PART II - AT HOME
1. HOMES, TRADITIONS, INFLUENCES
MS - Would you, please, characterise your homes, your families where you come from?
PK - I understand you are asking about the ethos in which we were brought up, whether it was positivism, idealism or individualism, etc.?
ZK - Certainly, strong rationalism. Well, we were both brought up in similar houses. I mean our parents...
PK - So called "cold, lay, realistic upbringing" - if we are to use adjectives a' la Tatarkiewicz.1 Our parents were very active in social issues - in the traditional understanding of the word. In other words: they were constantly on duty...
ZK -... to that system, to be frank.
PK - They participated in the creation of the foundation of that system, yes. Very conscientiously and honestly. Although now I do not consider it my duty to have similar views to my mother, I know that what she did was clean, honest and full of commitment. As the years were passing I started to realise a certain naiveté, some scout-like character of her behaviour which, finally, ended in a fiasco. It turned out that if she had opened her own craft shop, she would have found herself - and I with her - in an entirely different existential situation. It's so simple. Well, but these are just digressions.
ZK - But that kind of atmosphere of social work was at your home? This kind of working for ideals, for others, for the common good?
PK - Certainly, this was present as well. We were brought up with the consciousness of the ideal of a wall gazette.
ZK - Yes, we can describe it in this way.
PK - I will add that in my case the origins go back as far as the pre-war period. My mother's family was medical. My great grandfather was a doctor, the head of department at the Przemienienie Panskie (Transfiguration) Hospital in the Praga district of Warsaw. My grandfather was a doctor, my mother was a doctor, and my father was a doctor, too. A family of doctors in a traditional sense...
MS - Like Judym?
PK - No, not in this sense. It is simple - doctors doing a post mortem see a heart as such, they do not perceive a heart as a metaphor. Similarly, they know what is inside a man but they do not know what a soul is. So we can say the tradition is anti-metaphysical. Certainly, the statement "lay and anti-religious" must follow, mustn't it? Strangely enough, these doctors couldn't find anything spiritual within a human body, nor did they discover any bio-chemical God.
ZK - And what about stress?
PK - Well, that's a different matter. This is a fact - a fact proved by doctors. And by me. Perhaps stress is life? Between Siedlce - the hometown of my father's family - and Warsaw of my mother... There was constantly a portrait in straw of Piłsudski3 hung by grand-dad who was freed from Paviak4 thanks to a sum of money. This portrait was hanging next to our uncle's photo who had died young during his first AK5 action in the forest. There were also missionary orations by my grand mother - a simple woman, saturated with mystical love of God, Christ and the Gospel, which made our neighbours cry with repentance. This grand mother led me and, partially, my brothers through all stages of catechism, confession and the first communion. In Warsaw; however, in the years of the greatest enthusiasm, a Christmas tree was decorated white and red - certainly the colours were understood as the colours of the state free from social injustice and superstitions. There, my other grandma - an anarchist, a party member and a great freak - ran a house. She both cooked and gave lessons on law, Polish, mathematics, Latin and two other languages at university level . Grandfather was a fierce advocate of Dmowski6. Strangely enough - after coming back from a Soviet gulag7 , where he had lost 30 kilos, his views became red for a time. And there was also a cousin, an old spinster - always ill, whose one great and unconditional love I was, forever quarrelling with the rest of the family, mostly because of me. The description of her death, which I sent to her relatives, constituted a fragment of my first "Działania" (Activities) in Sigma on Thursday evenings.
ZK - I "appeared" thanks to a great post-war change. My father's family descended from blacksmiths, teachers and administrator-governors who lived in the Eastern borderlands. My father came from a very poor family of many children who lived in a Galician9 village. Our roots were totally destroyed. The street was my tutor and I was educated by ZHP10, Legia sports club, camps, scout gatherings, and sport training - a constant pursuit for a certain position in the hierarchy of a small, concrete community. I always dreamt that my father was the director of the National Museum. Yes, yes! Those were very powerful, painful and recurring dreams of living in a house where people constantly talk about art and which hosts artistic people. It was not necessary for me to be the family's own daughter. I might as well have been adopted as a result of intricate and dramatic circumstances and it would have turned out that I was exceptionally talented and worthy of the house which had taken me under its roof. Ha, ha, ha!
MS - Is there anything in the tradition you have just outlined here that you consciously reject in your life?
ZK - I reject one thing that I discovered in one of my parents - the helplessness of a person who has good intentions but is not able to do things well. Is not able to, yet, persists in doing things which are beyond this person. And sometimes this person spoils everything. I reject this now, both in art and in our life. At least I want to reject it. In myself...
PK - I prefer improving to rejecting. If I were to reject I would have to follow the rule of negating the negation and, consequently, I would have to accept what my grand mother and my mother rejected. They rejected, among other things, the situation of those who are looked at by hungry children in rags as they eat cakes at a café.
ZK -Well, you in turn, stare at Coca-Cola from outside in the street.
MS - What else shaped your cultural and world views, apart from tradition and family upbringing, that now constitutes the background and the source to which you consciously refer? In other words: what is the philosophical basis of your activities?
PK - I would say the basis is very broad, this means we do not feel alien to the flow of culture that is available to us through education. We perceived it as a whole, slightly an the academic way, so as not to lose anything from the concepts and achievements of arts and sciences made to date. Yet, the preferences and choices made later - and they were made - depended on a particular situation of inconvenience and , what comes after it, the thought of overcoming it. I do not want to anyone to make a mistake and think that we had a certain pre-conceived ideal which we persistently tried to realize. No. I would rather say that "nothing human is strange to us"; however, the fact that we later chose to deal with a certain thing, and not another - which adds a specific color to our work - is matter of a decision; the decision as to which of the streams in culture we should support bearing in mind the good of our imperfect surroundings. It is likely that if we were to live in another time or other conditions our work would look entirely different. I am not sure whether we would not go more deeply into existential issues, or purely formal or... just different ones.
MS - By saying this, you reveal your philosophical "background". The dependence on conditions... the fact that existence shapes... the consciousness ... yes?
PK - The existence shapes the aesthetics. This is the thesis which I have recently invented. It corresponds quite well with the character of our work. It means that man does not shape his aesthetics because of some unknown reasons, his experiences, etc. It is each previous existence that shapes the following aesthetics. What does it look like in our work, in our moves seen through the eye of the camera or another man? None of our visual manifestations has been taken out of the blue. Each has its background in earlier visual manifestations, in earlier steps. This is the difference between our work and other works of this kind, where one cannot trace their origins. It means, one can see what were ideological or emotional reasons of a given creation but nothing else. And that "else" is important for us. Let me give an example: there is a photo, very pretty, dramatic, expressive, etc. It shows a woman on the beach against a background of dark clouds. However, you do not know who the woman is, why she is there, what the landscape presents. However, if we were taking such a picture, we might present earlier steps which would show the woman in her earlier relations, explain how it happened that we are together with the woman in that place, show even her birth ... This is they way we do such things.
ZK - While you were speaking I was thinking of myself and asking whether I have had any contact with any cultural tradition at all. You know... a practical, direct contact which you can present in a reliable way. At home, at school...? In life in general. After all, it did not have to be like that.
MS - It is important which tradition you yourself approve of. That is why I asked about where you search for the stable ground to which you can always return after each adventure.
ZK - There is no such return... I feel a little like a child brought up by mates in the playground who has no distinctly shaped habits or behaviour. This is the way I perceive my relation to culture - I can say no tradition, no influence. That is depressing.
MS - What personalities, authorities, or - perhaps, phenomena in art influenced you significantly in your youth? Let us ignore the period of studies for a while. I am asking about a wider context - of you entering adult life.
ZK - It seems to me that we always - and not only we, each artist perhaps - are influenced by a model and situation of an independent artist, by his fate understood as: he and his contemporary milieu that does not understand him, despises him and is hostile towards him. A romantic myth of a hermit-artist who knows he or she is running a risk, nevertheless, chooses this risk and follows his own way.
PK - Yes, this is one of the contemporary myths which was, at least in those years, instilled by the society. However, we managed to disentangle the myth in time thanks to learning facts - getting acquainted with particular artists. After all, each name or activity of an artist whom we know only from a description is a myth, even if you have seen his works. We realised that meeting people in person or co-operating with them was the best cure for myths. Myths evaporate. We had such an aim in mind when we visited Beuys. Similarly - when we invited other artists to PDDiU
ZK - Nevertheless, I cannot see any "masters". There are artists who impressed us at a certain time, e.g. Linke whose retrospective exhibition I saw at the National Museum when still a pupil in 1963. Yet, when we watched the same works on different occasions later; certainly, their impact was smaller. Similarly Malczewski - at first I was strongly impressed by his works but later while looking at several of his pictures I noticed parts of even awkward painting. I felt sad. Things were different in Wróblewski's case. We always considered his "extra-artistic" activities most important. During our studies we came across an MA dissertation written under the direction of Janusz Bogucki in Torun that explained these issues. His painting was less important for us, we found it, well... mediocre.
PK - Yet, it is this facet of his creative activity which is widely publicised - a fact which does not correspond to what he really created.
ZK - There was also Picasso in Zacheta, there was van Gogh at the Museum. I remember retrospectives in the '60s: Linke, Malczewski, and others. I watched some educational films at the National Museum... It was also at that time that "a life and works" series of books was published in Poland: van Gogh, Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec, Wyspianski. The very titles created a certain mood: "The Passion of Life", "Hell and Paradise", "The Guarded Fire". This mood did not correspond to the official aura of socialist art - merry and invigorating. Who knows, perhaps I witnessed, quite unconsciously, the process of breaking the image of what art is: a merry, futurist slogan or a suffering and madness. When I was seventeen I met Zarebski, Kawiak, the late Ewek... Ewek Kurewek11, the boss of artistic bohemia in Krakowskie Przedmieocie Street in the '60s! They were living heirs to Modigliani's and Toulouse-Lautrec's lifestyle. They created an atmosphere similar to that which is in Picasso's drawings from the series "at the studio". They were an important direct contact with the carriers an of anti-Philistine stance, the faith in and suffering for Art. There was also a preponderant presence of art on its applied level. Picasso-like abstraction on curtains, bought at "Cepelia"12 . Professional artists made them and one could see them in every interior. I remember we had moved into a new flat and parents bought a suit of these decorations - you cannot call it furniture - all those tables on three legs, twisted lamps, lampshades made of plastic string, and all those... patches combined with lines and triangles. I also remember the influence of the press, e.g. Oseka's and Skrodzki's features. One might say they ... poisoned us so much. It was poisoning not because they bored us to death but they poisoned us and made us feel pessimistic and reluctant about anything that was rational, about the will to act and improve things.
PK - As for me, I will say, that I knew Dobrowolski's "Nowoczesne malarstwo polskie" ("Modern Polish Painting") by heart.13 I do not know whether someone had taught me it or not, anyway - I knew it. I knew everything that was in museums by heart, and I still do, because I visited museums very often. I was making sketches, etc. so I am saturated with it. Impact - well, I was impressed by everyone in turn: Mehoffer, Wojtkiewicz - a great influence at a particular time, Matejko, why not, Malczewski... Nevertheless, an interesting thing happened - the so called "roots of modernity" did not impress me at all (I am speaking about myself) , Strzeminski, Kobro, or all those constructivist-abstract celebrities, even later ones like Alfred Lenica. And Witkacy.. Well, I did not go in for it too much. An interesting point for a discussion: why? When there was Picasso's exhibition at Zacheta, I was really interested. Yet, well... perhaps those ones are better. So, generally, I do not find any "masters" in more recent art. As opposed to the art of the period between the two world wars and earlier. Certainly, the issue looks different in case of your direct teachers who automatically become your masters.
ZK - There was a time in our life when we found Kotarbinski14 more inspiring than any artist.
PK - Of course! The whole period...
ZK - We were influenced by truths or theories that were very general. We were more open to them than to concrete realisations of someone's artistic programmes or theories. The latter we ignored a little.
PK - Yes, certainly. A rational trend originating not from artistic creation but a scientific one; the Lvov-Warsaw school of philosophy with Kotarbinski himself. We were lucky to listen to probably the last public lectures by Kotarbinski and Tatarkiewicz. We have got them recorded. And Suchodolski and Topolski, too. Afterwards we participated for a long time in other seminars devoted to topics not connected with art directly, organised by PAN15 and universities. Kotarbinski's independent ethics - how well it sounds together with such terms as "independent art", "independent artist", doesn't it? However, it denoted entirely opposite things than those later labels. It was defined as an ethical stance that does not require references to religious or ideological premises, it allowed an individual to rely on his inner experience in this respect. And his "concretism" in ontological and semantic spheres? It let us cut, as if with a razor, illusions pertaining to "the existence of apparent beings" that lurked everywhere in a stupid or cunning way: in critical and political writings, in newspeak - which created victims.
MS - Victims?
PK - And how many were killed, shot in the name of those illusions? Further, there was "contretist somaticim" that encouraged one to speak about the acts of will, thinking, perception, etc. as of the acts of individuals and only in the form of a sentence: "Jan is experiencing, is doubtful, is thirsty." Like that: Jan, Piotr, I, Zosia - and not like that: they, them, we, collective, mass, socialist society, enemies, artists, labourers, etc. Is it not like a whip for all authoritative, doctrinaire and commenting enunciations of what it was like, what it is like and what it should be like in the brains of Poles in bulk? Shouldn't this stance of Kotarbinski's, together with his logic of acting, become for Poles, what pragmatism is for Americans? In the era of marking values with monuments I demand a monument for this man! Hm... such a lot had to be told just to answer the question about influences: a book. The fictional world of literature, cinema, newspapers. After all I have spent half of my life in this world. There is an anecdote from the Academy times: first there comes a book, then comes Kwiek who holds it in his hands, finally comes the rest. Balzac - at that time I read all available Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Cervantes, Boccaccio, Turgenev, Paustovski, Bunin, Sologub, Goncharov, Dostoevski, Reymont, Prus, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, "A Treatise on Good Work"16, Descartes, Marx... I can add that at that time I constituted an indispensable element of the Philharmonic landscape. The question arises: was it good or bad? Good - because I did not become a drunkard...
ZK - And you were just about to become an element of the landscape at Hopfer.
PK - But I met Hamilton there, I regard him highly. I met Wiktor Gajda, Jurry Zieliński. I saw Himilsbach and all this... vodoo (from vodka+zoo). Well, coming back to the topic - it was bad because it increased my difficulties with crossing the border between imagination and its nourishment on one hand and, on the other, the role of a producer which I was to assume and who had little time for production left. The problem with scraps of time which are being nibbled by an armchair. I have this problem even today.... Wait, how did I write it in my poem? - "if one could pass from the thought and start doing something, anything." And when the necessity of potboiling got somehow entangled in it, moreover in PRL - a tragedy!
PART II - AT HOME
2. STUDIES
MS - The catalogue of your retrospective exhibition begins with 1968. You were both students at that time.
PK - My most important achievement at the Academy was to acknowledge a process as a work of art. Acknowledging the process as a work of art and acknowledging documentation as a work of art led to the same effect. Certainly, I understand a process as acting according to the rules of praxeology, i.e. characterised by skill. The skill serves as a tool for adding various aesthetics-decorations to works of art; however, the criteria the evaluation of this skill are always beyond the sphere of art.
MS - How come such an abstract issue of process appeared in a sculptor's' studio?
ZK - The point is - let me answer for you, OK? - that you treated seriously the task that Prof. Jarnuszkiewicz had given you. He asked you... well, he did not have to, it was a student's responsibility ... A student had to have stages of his work documented because it often happened that, let 's say, while making a nude study a student transformed the sculpted object so much that a work at different stages was like a work on two different pieces - sometimes better, but sometimes worse.
MS - Photographs were necessary for correction?
PK - Firstly, the reason was that the majority of nudes was not cast in plaster. The casts were too expensive, so photography was the only means of retaining the work.
ZK - Yes, Students were obliged to present their photographic portfolios to obtain a credit for a semester.
MS - But the process as a separate issue was not Jarnuszkiewicz's interest. It was Hansen's.
PK - How do I know? At that time it was my fourth, and Zosia's third year, 1967/68, Hansen was still doing basic training.
ZK - But he was constantly talking about process. Being in the process... the processisation... The academic year 1970/1971 was at the apogee of our thinking on that issue. In that year we treated the process as a separate practical and artistic problem - the film "Open Form" was made. We have minutes and recordings of discussions preceding its realisation. During these discussions we tried to answer the question: why should we work with a movie camera? Our analysis followed such a train: if we want to document pasta we should use a photographic camera and if we want to add an earth-worm to pasta, we should use a movie camera. We inflected the word "process" in all possible ways in every sentence.
PK - As a matter of fact, the issue was also derived from my psyche. I was not able - I saw the nonsense of doing something for a longer time, e.g. a nude study and then deforming it so that the study expressed a model's character better. This was kind of a canon at the Academy. Simply, I was not able to imagine how one could make a realistic study of a model and simultaneously deform the achieved realism, so as not to demonstrate one's ability to imitate nature but to demonstrate one's ability to present something different from the study itself, i.e. one's own or the model's inner self. Since I could not understand it there was only one thing left for me: to study a model in a copyist manner. Come on! That was not acceptable for me! Even though I had had a four-year realistic training under Helena Stachurska and the Wdowiszewscy. I remember when I started to do such a study already on my second year in Professor Nitschowa's class. I spent three weeks over one leg. I made it ideally- like Michelangelo or Canova; however, when I realised that there was still the other leg awaiting, and the torso, and two hands, I simply... It was an absurdity compared to what life offered - life which was very colourful and rich in the halls. One thing did not suit the other absolutely, did it? After all - why should it, what drive was there in it? I understand Canova, I understand Michelangelo - such were creative tasks in their time, such was social demand and money were paid for that. So, when I got a camera into my hand in Jarnuszkiewicz's studio and was asked to make documentation, the rest came somehow automatically. At the very moment the photo was taken, the work lost its importance, because it had already been made permanent. So what? It could have been changed. In numerous ways. And so on, step by step. What was important were the changes coming day after day. And I want to mention a certain psychological motivation. I always wanted to see the reaction of the public immediately. The way of studying obligatory at the Academy, I mean things like studies of that leg, or in a wider perspective - classical approach to art - made this entirely impossible. It is so because the very process of making a work of art lasts a year or more and the process of receiving the work even longer. The artist is not able to obtain any response which will influence his next step in a sufficiently short time. Certainly, there is also a question of contemporary times as such. I felt the need for a response in the shortest time, almost instantly - because this response determines my next step. And then appears the thirst for the next reaction, of course - positive! Perhaps, again, this is rooted in my cool upbringing - I craved, according to the rule of contrast - some warmth, some love, as one could poetically phrase it. The classical mode of studying made the reception of such a psychological compensation which I yearned for impossible. Yet the way in which I stated to sculpt made it possible.
I undertook this issue after doing my diploma work. I decided not to create a work "behind a screen" as graduates used to do. I chose to be among students and follow a syllabus of the next year: nude studies; however, in my own way, starting from making shapes from paper and including all stages of cast making in the process. I wrote a diary-analysis, I made slides, photographs and a film. It was the year 1969/70. I devoted the two entire previous years to studying models in stages- each stage after having photographed a previous one. "Man-Dick" is the second of four stages of the study of a model - Cisak, from 1967/68.
ZK - Yes, but we should remember someone who also made such "steps". And I know, because I remember, that it influenced you strongly - not the theory propagated by that man, but a practical solution of the problem. This man was Tadeusz Skwarczynski. It was thanks to him that you came across a solution found by a man who did not say anything about it. He did not use the term "processisation", but he did the thing itself!
PK - Yes. The same happened in drawing... However, at that time, we must not forget, there was a whole complex of problems - the whole glory shouldn't go solely to Skwarczynski. Jan Wojciechowski made a pretty good distinction of things in his introduction to the catalogue "25 lat pracy pedagogicznej Jerzego Jarnuszkiewicza" ("25 Years of Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz's Teaching"). Well, I am glad that such initiatives which someone had taken before are now remembered because this makes my historical background longer and, in a way, makes the history of Polish art longer; it reaches the very source, it does not derive from "Studio International". Certainly Skwarczynski is no longer worth considering now because he simply stopped doing such things.
ZK - However, if we are going back in search for forerunners...
PK - I can bet we would be able to find someone from whom Skwarczynski had taken the idea.
ZK - No. I think we would find Hansen with his practical teaching methods.
PK - Ehm... Well, yes, yes. But the practice of taking pictures and abandoning the thing in order to start another one was Jarnuszkiewicz's practice, wasn't it?
ZK - Indeed, we used a photo camera at Jarnuszkiewicz's classes, however in a more traditional way. Just for the sake of documenting... You are right, you just reminded me that those who did not make plaster casts made photos and presented them at an exhibition as the achievement of a studio. While in Hansen's case .... I cannot remember exactly now, but there were films made, for example. A film documented how a student copes with a certain task using a suitable tool. In Hansen's studio, which was called The Design Studio of Figures and Surfaces, one could find many tools for visual exercises, for practising simultaneous movements and for exercises on the so called "great number", as well as many others.
PK - Yes, there were.... Simultaneous movements. Nika Kozakiewicz also made a film for her diploma work. The legends circulated about scandals when a sculptor presented a film as an effect of his work to a commission.
ZK - This spirit - of documenting in a way that is adequate to the work, as well as the consciousness accompanying you during your working that whatever you do, you can have it documented, so you can more freely "transform" your work - this spirit comes from Hansen.
PK - I want to remember Szwacz, too. He invented and applied the theory of ars-hormism or "artistic activating of imagination". "Hormes" is a Greek word meaning: vital force. Manual work, psycho-physical predisposition and an artist's talent are the most important elements creating the essence of a piece of art, i.e. its pictorial or linear matter, not literary or para-philosophical speculations. Practically, it meant the manifestation of one's energy by an impulsive movement on a paper with the use of, e.g. a model, if an academic study was a case. Certainly, energy is a continuity and manifests itself constantly in a non-homogeneous way. Thus an effect in, let's say, the case of one model will be one hundred drawings of every kind. Sometimes it was so, that you divided a sheet of paper into 40 fields and "made" the nude in each field, always in a different way, using different tools. Some students reached absolute perfection in it or, sometimes, caricatured the method. One of those students was me.
ZK - Yes, true. And Skwarczynski, too.
PK - Again, this suited my psyche and my predisposition. This means; there is nothing constant, everything flows and each deformation has no other excuse but technological and material conditions plus the data of a previous stage. I consider psycho-physical predisposition an automatic component. They play a main role in the so called "spontaneous stage" of my Activities. There is nothing like this already mentioned woman in a cloudy landscape. Nobody knows where is it taken from - she, these clouds, these trees... It isn't so that this line, its softness, its windings stem from my "spirit", is it? It comes from the fact that a previous drawing was made in a thin, simple line - so it derives from contrast. Through juxtapositions I show the dialectics of both the form and the content, and also the model. And the whole is perceived not from one field but, for instance, from 26. [look a later realizations conceptual-medial: combinatoric presentations on a plane splited into fields]
ZK - Yes, we do not appreciate Szwacz sufficiently today...
PK - And one should absolutely appreciate Szwacz! Yes: Hansen and Szwacz. A good student wishes to penetrate his professor, to become his professor and to realise his theory even better than the professor himself. I was such a student. Combining Szwacz with my predisposition of which I have just told, with this lack of faith in any constant ideals, with one hundred per cent realism which I represented, all this, together with my getting a camera thanks to which I could stop any process in its particular stage at any moment - well, this simply had further implications.
However, Hansen... Hansen's culture, his ethos - rooted not just anywhere since it goes back to Le Corbusier, always forces one to select the elements of each chaotic or spontaneous vital manifestation. It pushes one to divide, classify, analyse the consequences, model, scrutinise, verify, and so on, and so forth. And to introduce clear criteria of evaluation. Kandinsky with his "Point and a line on a surface" might be an older brother here. Thus Hansen equals methodology.
MS - And not the philosophy of art or even a vision of art? How was it done? Was his lecturing on his theory, did he make verbal comments, or did he only instil it practically through exercises?
PK - Do you mean "Open Form"?
ZK - Certainly, it is a kind of philosophy. According to the definition Open Form is the art of creating the background for unique things. To present it suitably to Hansen's professional; field, it would be an art of constructing architecture which makes a man using it conspicuous and contrasts with him; it gets into service-like, informative and functional interactions with him and, concurrently, it does not overwhelm with its form. The form can function politically, despite everything. It can simply be a tool of power, e.g. a typical closed form: The Palace of Culture. Hansen would say that - I quote my notes of April 1970: "1) A totalitarian Open Form is impossible. 2) Open Form abolishes a frontal, one-directional approach to any magnitude (work of art, deity), 3) Open Form is fulfilled in the conditions where a man and the other side mutually influence each other, are in a movement, and yield place in favour of the other side."
Coming back to ourselves: as we have said, we are not able to reject Hansen; even if we wanted to. And sometimes we want to because it simply might make our thinking on a project and its realisation easier. However at present it is not possible. Hansen always appears at a certain stage of thinking on a work. He appears also when we evaluate works of others, which happens very often to us.
PK - Always!
ZK - When we sum up works by other artists we also... we apply Hansen's language outright. Till today. Although I, and I think that both of us, feel sometimes the burden of the necessity to analyse, to think in an Hansenian way.
PK - Come on! Let us not exaggerate. Now, we are applying for example our intuition quite often. And what about C-happenings in "The Separate Whole" ("Całostka"), namely free and fantastic things, and "a spontaneous stage" of "Activities" ("Działania")
ZK - But still, we do not apply expression.
PK - Huh! Expression?
ZK - We always appear as if in armour. We are armoured by Hansen. It pertains also to our self-estimation.
MS - I have also a question concerning your relations with colleagues. Grzegorz Kowalski recalls the existence of a duo Kwiek-Dwurnik at that time.
PK - Indeed. Perhaps not a duo, but really, there was a resonance between us in the Academy. I was expelled from the Visual Arts Lycée after my first year because I had bad marks in mathematics and physics; Edek was kicked out after his third year for bad behaviour. Thus, we continued our lessons on painting and drawing privately under the Wdowiszewscy at their house in Hoża street. They did it completely for free preparing us for the Academy. Consequently, our works were also hanging at the final exhibition of the graduates of the Lycée. This was an exceptional case in pedagogy. Well, at the Academy already, I got the best mark in mathematics, so I was excused from the final exam. I was an eternal, always hesitant sower of alternatives while Edek who knew both life and the folks could make quick decisions - we complemented each other... Until women started to be our complements, ha ha ha! I took up sculpture because I was better prepared for the exam. There was no exceptional love for this field of art behind it. In a fragment of my diploma, at the polychrome stage I performed the task of a painter. Edek, on the other hand, which was an amazing event, if not blatancy, swapped painting under Eibisch for sculpture so that he could try Jarnuszkiewicz and Hansen for at least a year. We attended lithography under Pakulski together. However, what is important here, is the beginning of the so called interaction and integration. In 1967\68, Edek painted his town within an interior shown outside which was the last stage of my student's nude fixed in a plaster cast, after a long period of my search in clay, and I, in turn, entered this town. He was invited by me as a conscious coincidence to "join in" the process. Later, in the April of 1969 at the "Medyk" gallery we drew "to each other" on the walls of the gallery. Teresa Gierzynska also participated in it. In my terminology those were "non-public, interchangeable and simultaneous "Activities"("Działania") and "joining in". We remained close creative contact until Edek's "black" period in the '70s.
ZK – The cycle of Sunday meetings at Edek's at Miedzylesie in 1973, the first exhibition of PDDiU in 1975, our leaflet issued as a part of "service art" that separated Edek from the campaign "For Improvement", the co-painting of a picture for a competition on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution - all this was in a way a continuation of our former contacts; however, with the two of us appearing as a KwieKulik duo. In 1985 we presented our work for sale at the Dziekanka. It was called "Buying an Artist". Edek bought us to elaborate and distribute a "sending" containing a response to an article about him in "Kultura Niezależna" ("Independent Culture"). So far, the sending has not happened; however, the stencil has been prepared. This has so far been our last artistic contact with the Edeks.
PART II - AT HOME
3. 1ST PERIOD (1968-1974)
MS - Let us come back to the date 1968 which marks the beginning of your creative work and the beginning of its first period. Why this particular year?
ZK - 1968 was the year of Przemek's student work in which he applied the already discussed method of "steps" for the first time. Of course, at that stage it was half-intuitive and lacked theoretical justification. That method, when developed further, led to visual games, to group work, to some attempts to solve the questions of integration in art. The photography of his work of 1968 "Man-Dick" constitutes an element of a piece supplemented by a commentary in 1974 "A Bird from Plaster To Bronze in the Barracks of Fine Arts" ("Ptak od gipsu do brazu w Barakach Sztuk Plastycznych"), consequently, they together formed a new piece. We consider both a breakthrough in our work.
MS - The first period lasted until 1974?
ZK - Yes, 1968-1974.
PK - So, we had already started this "way of production" of ours. Here one can use the word "jazz". This word appeared in the film "Open Form", in the part shot at the tv studio. A group of artists acted simultaneously in a continuous way. They acted interdependently, including the camera operator. Consequently, a documentation and "Activities" ("Dzialania") were being created at the same time. In that case a film was a documentation and "Activities" ("Dzialania") together with the documentation could only appear in a form created in a given moment since there were no repetitions. This was not yet a game since a game is something more systematic, accordant with rules.... One can make comparisons here with all kinds of art that have this immediate response, ha! - even the public's absolute identification with the artist's creative process. The unity of space, time, the process of sending and receiving, the simultaneity of registering. That seemed modern to me.
ZK - Przemek did his diploma in 1970 and while I was working on mine for the following academic year 1970-71 he used to visit the Academy as a graduate almost every day to disturb us a little. After all there was a tradition of a tea-table at Jarnuszkiewicz's studio - a very important tradition of talks on art and not only art. At the beginning of that academic year, in the Autumn of 1970, an important action took place. A group of students - apart from us two there were Jan Wojciechowski and Bartek Zdrojewski - gave the signal: leave the premises of the Academy, find a field larger than the board of the sculptor's working table and do something in such an external, real situation. We temporarily called the action "Excursion" ("Wycieczka"). We have a film of this - 8mm and photos. A fragment of "Excursion" was published in a magazine "Nowy Wyraz" ("New Expression") issue 12/1975 together with our title-commentary "Going outside into the open air with a small, clean, rectangular field of consciousness, a red rose and Urszula Kwiek". I had just arrived from my vacations in London from where I had brought three slide projectors and was then working very hard on documentation. Well, it was my diploma year. I documented situations of every description, including private ones, like the above-mentioned "Excursion" or meetings of the company among whom you could find Grzegorz Kowalski, Magda Falender, Karol Broniatowski and many other people. There was a sequence with a naked model - Halina Zawadzka in her flat, there was another - with Przemek lying on his and Kowalski's "Horizontal Composition" ("Kompozycja horyzontalna") built from whole grain black bread...
PK - Mrs Halina, a later discovery of Cieślarowa's, who exhibited her work in Repassage.... During that "Excursion" and during my visits to the Academy Kowalski was absent, he was in the USA then. We were completely alone. Grzegorz sent us tapes with a lot of news from the USA.
ZK - I used to take a pre-prepared element for an "Excursion" - a white screen. It was my idea to place the screen in various real situations that were, nevertheless, coincidental, not pre-planned. It was meant to be a sort of neutral little field in the surrounding reality that I wanted to organise later in such a way that I would present another slide or film on the background of a picture or slide showing a place with this very white screen. [see a later computer made 'picture-in-picture']. In one word - I planned a more sophisticated medial work. And what turned out? During the "Excursion" my screen stared to be used as a normal object: it was either a folded or an unfolded screen or it would wave in the wind, etc.... We were at a cemetery, in front of the Palace of Culture. We took Przemek's sister with us. She was mentally retarded and she was also a kind of an element, an object which we added to various realities that we met on our way And that was an introduction to our further work in a group - team work.
PK - And still, you continued to work on your diploma.
ZK - Yes, I was constantly making documentation. In every possible situation and with each piece I created such a visual memoir. Later, using this picture-slide material I constructed my diploma work. It was a projection on three screens with its own structural narration. A copy of Michelangelo's Moses - usually standing in the hall of the Academy - that I made of colourful, stiffened rags was an addition to this medial show. Activities on this edifice (not the copy) constituted an episode of the film "Open Form", so everything overlapped and linked then.
And as far as team work is concerned, "Open Form" came next after the "Excursion". What was the team work about? A general premise was not to make a film but to work with a camera. We had seven days. We knew that we would have the camera for only seven days so we divided that period in such a way that we were to work in a different situation, pre-arranged by ourselves each day. We had chosen the following situations: a table with food, a school, Moses's edifice library, tv studio, Hansen's studio, the Palace of Culture, an actress's face, open air Unfortunately, the library material was lost and that was one of the most interesting episodes because there were some activities of reproductions of works of art. I remember we used Warhol's "Marilyn Monroe" and some other up-to-date work of world art combined with, e.g. Malczewski. Two months later we went for one day 's shooting Lodz Film School. There, Paweł Kwiek filmed our activities on slides that had been performed simultaneously with a film and that contained images not present on the film.
MS - Do you mean an episode called "Activities on Slides"?
PK - Exactly. Done for the first time - "Activities on the documentation of Activities" or "Commentary Art". We are going to talk about it later. At that time no one dreamt about electronic, computer or digital image processing. Certainly, we processed the slides and the images on them manually before the eye of the camera "in micro-scale" during a several-hour session.
A meta-narration in a meta-medial sphere was the objective. Later, the slides enlivened in such a way were set in particular places in the film as a continuation of the live activities. For example, "the behaviour" of Ewa Lemańska with a white screen on the stand in front of the Palace of Culture. It was shot from the side of the square. We wanted to inset a slide into it. She was holding a white rectangle over her head ideally on the axis against the background of the palace. Suddenly this rectangle burns, together with the slide - you can see the head of a match burst and the film of the slide melts. On another shot you can see a tip of a marker approach from the back and putting a tick on the rectangle and on another the whole thing revolves around 360°.
ZK - The film "Open Form" has not really been finished yet, that is, it was re-organised three times on various occasions but it has never been made an orderly whole. Moreover, it still lacks a sound track.
PK - The issue of the film projections is interesting. We did so called "interrupted projections". The first public projection took place at the Festival of Art School Students in Nowa Ruda in the June of 1971
ZK - Our basis was to have a continuation of what had been going on the screen during the breaks - filmed activities with the public, namely "a provocation with a camera". In other words - provoking the audience to do something instead of only watching passively what the artist had done. We also planned to have some live activities with various materials, something that today is called "performance". Finally - the projection on a screen, besides the film, corresponding slides from three projectors, that is a multiprojection. And it was really done so...
PK - And how! A real Niagara. Obviously, a synchronised slide projection failed and consecutive breaks and the light in the room together with cameras making shots of the public made the public gradually more and more furious to the point nearing pandemonium, uncontrolled power - and the cinema was large, panoramic and - full. However, there was a person who introduced himself after the presentation and expressed his regard for the film.
ZK - It was Jozef Robakowski who we met on that occasion.
PK - A next event when we used all that stuff was our appearance in the Boguckis' "Wpolczesna" ("Contemporary") Gallery in December 1971. We divided the days of our appearances according to the audience, i.e. different people were invited for a different day: secondary school pupils, students, art critics and, let call it, "normal public". Each of the evenings had its own script prepared considering the type of the audience from the "building material" we had a few hours before. This was an attempt to apply the method of "the Trojan Horse". Right afterwards we made a similar synchronic interrupted projection - this time peaceful - during our visit on the invitation by Leszek Przyjemski and Anastazy Wiśniewski in Elbląg in December 1971. Secondary school pupils were our audience. We have got about thirty essays by the participants. The event was combined with the latest music of the time that had not yet reached Poland and was not yet on the radio - the Woodstock festival.
ZK - Elbląg, the most important thing! Earlier, in September 1971 there was a "Dreamers' Meeting" - but that is another issue. At that time only Przemek was invited and Wojciechowski and I were accompanying persons. Yet, we worked in a similar way as we had worked in the case of "Open Form", i.e. we were constantly transforming something...
PK - We two. Jan was working individually.
ZK -.. we transformed the present reality, and that meant a gallery and works by other artists. The artists who were present at the event sometimes got very nervous because we touched their work. Constant transformations, composing and documenting.
PK - Let me remind you that it was also at that time that we started to use the term "Parasite art" ("Sztuka pasozytnicza") or "Activities on others works" ("Dzialanie na dzielach innych").
ZK - Dreamers' Meeting" was one thing; however, in the same year we paid the already mentioned visit to Elblag at the "Meetings of the Young Creative Workshop" ("Spotkania Młodego Warszatatu Twórczego") organised by Anastazy and ourselves with Hansen, Kowalski, students, and the playing at the hill Wzgorze Morela
PK - A team game appeared for the first time there. That is a game between two teams not, as in an episode of "Open Form" between an actress's face and particular people in one group.
ZK - Do you remember - we suggested a third group apart from the two competing ones, namely a formallyseparate documenting group.
PK - Yes, this was also the first case of introducing a documenting group -Paweł Kwiek, Jacek Łomnicki, Jacek Niedbał and Marian Rumin an art historian who prepared a description of the game.
MS - What was this Red Group that interfered between the Blacks and the Whites?
ZK - The Reds was a group from The Workshop of Film Forms (Warsztat Formy Filmowej) with Anastazy and his red flags. They butted into the game entirely by chance.
PK - By chance from our point of view; however, they, as Anastazy claims in his description, deliberately "went to see how the kids play". They wanted to enter a school with real life.
MS - In that "Elblag season", starting from Autumn 1971, a group Sigma at Warsaw University started to act and from March 1972 - Gallery, later called Repassage. Was that something important for you?
Both - Yes, Yes!
PK - Yet, to keep order, we should mention the earlier experience in the field of performance, mostly with actors - meetings at Kazimierz (April 1971) that occurred before Nowa Ruda and meetings in Gizycko (August-September 1971) before the Dreamers. Zosia was absent from Kazimierz. There, a group following me contrasted with and provoked an actor who through improvising had to change his behaviour in accordance with the "background" created in such a way, and the background also responded to his reactions. What was important was our attempt to judge whether his "play" was good or bad. We also tried to make judgements from the point of view of a hypothetical observer whether the whole group-actor created any structural unity. We repeated the thing if either this or that was wrong. I remember my and Wojciechowski's exhilaration on the way back by coach. I had a sense of having achieved something new. At Gizycko - at the camp of the Co-ordination Committee of Art Schools - we tried to comment on actors' improvisations using the method of so called "equivalents". This means that we translated each gesture, movement, word of an actor in everyday situation: a walk, a cafe, shopping, paying, a street, a play into the visual language, e.g. a sign, a symbol. The compositions of signs and symbols can be analysed by visualists from the point of e.g. composition, contrast, dynamics, associations, etc. One can apply this method, not only to us and actors, but also to artists of any field in art in general. The barriers of education and medial languages disappear and one group is to evaluate the other: good or bad. The film "Open Form" assumed this for artists and camera operators. There is only one artist without any modifiers: visual, musician, actor, etc. if only he is able to translate languages. Fields of art are nothing but a variety of languages. I wrote about this in my "Report" from Gizycko.
MS - And what happened in Sigma?
ZK - It was mostly Przemek who appeared there. I didn't so much... Others who appeared there were Paweł Freisler, Marek Konieczny, Krzysztof Zarębski, Krzysztof Pęciński, Tomasz Osiński, "Gutty" that is Wiktor Gutt and Waldemar Ramiszewski, Jacek Malicki, Milo Kurtis...
PK - That was not a group strongly as linked and following its own problems as in the case of "Open Form". In that case the work was freer, as if parallel, independent and - what is important - "viewer oriented".
ZK - Yet, the question of integration, of a group work was constantly raised. There were such proposals for, e.g. musicians.
PK - Yes, in Sigma we met a group of musicians playing so called "intuitive music" for the first time. The musicians used their instruments and played on them in a similar way to that in which we used objects or props in our "Activities" ("Działania"). This was an opportunity to enlarge our idea of integration with musicians. And all in all, such a total form started to emerge... The total form of activities in all fields of art - "an intuitive co-operation", as I called it. Well, sometimes a visual artist took an instrument and did something with it, and sometimes a musician would take our object and start composing something. The apogee of that group's activity was "Activities in the TV Studio" ("Dzialania" w Studio TV") in the Autumn of 1972 that we two had organised. There is a 16-mm film documenting this activity, beautifully dated - the date impressed people even in America. The film was shown in Poland only once, in Lodz in 1983 and is good enough to be presented on tv.
ZK - About 10 people participated.
PK - Krzysztof Zarębski, Jan Wojciechowski, Jacek Dobrowolski, Jacek Łomnicki, Paweł Kwiek, a band "Grupa w składzie": Jacek Malicki, Andrzej Kasprzyk, Milo Kurtis and us.
ZK - We had a tv studio and a props store at our disposal for four days. Przemek and I tried to organise new situations in a Hansenian way, just create backgrounds, backgrounds and surroundings in which others would behave in some way or do something. The other possibility was to make their constructions or their behaviour "conspicuous". One day we made "sites" for activities: a word/an expression - sound - a prop/an object. Everyone went through all of them. There was also "an exit" from the studio outside, similar to ours at the Academy There was hours-long, documented intuitive co-operation in the domain of material space music and notion.
PK - Summing up, we lashed our grey world with visual media and unfolded its peacock tail, enfolded in matter. Ontological concretism says: universalia and hypostases do not exist. Thus you cannot paint or sculpt them "from nature". There are objects, their configurations and structures that can be changed and multiplied endlessly in a process; works of art do not belong to them. Art is a self-training - a training of a changer. Everything has a certain aesthetics - everyday aesthetics. The changer produces a non-everyday aesthetics provoking meanings and displaying alternatives, he demonstrates ability. He gets in a feedback relation with others - experiencing bodies. He works on a pre-associative level: on no subject, whether imposed or welcome.
MS - Summing up your first period one should also mention the very documentation because this had already started.
PK - As for documentation, I think that our influence was great, especially starting form the mid seventies. We brought documentation to Elbląg, Wrocław, and thanks to Paweł Kwiek - to Lodz. We presented it in Sigma, in Lublin, at The Art Institute, it entered "Dziekanka" through Tomek Sikorski. I stress that we do not mean a medial presentation of conceptual works that appeared abundantly at that time. Afterward it became generally clear that documentation has its own role and is an indispensable factor in this kind of art. However, earlier the thing was unknown and someone had to introduce it. I think it was us who introduced it. At the beginning of the 70s none of the artists dealing with so called ephemeral art documented their work. That is a sheer fact. After all you cannot call some journalists' photographs a documentation in our understanding.
ZK - Do you remember what Bartlomiej Malysa recently told you in New York?
PK - Right! Some facts are only confirmed after a dozen or more years. Malysa used to tell us - he was then linked with a conceptually biased group Galeria Sztuki Aktualnej (The Gallery of Up-to-date Art) from Wroclaw. Its members were Dobrosław Bagiński, Jolanta Marcolla, Zdzisław Sosnowski, Janusz Haka - he told us about them watching our documentation on colour slides at the festival at Nowa Ruda in 1971 for the first time. For them it was like a thunderbolt. Immediately, they organised a workshop in Zakopane where they only acted and documented. Immediately! They had run across such a thing for the first time. Medialism, which they knew, was not so important, rather it was a documented "Activities" ("Dzialania").
ZK - This is a technical problem and one of the merits: a live appearance as a work of art and documentation as a work of art. What are the relations between them, how true is the document, what cuts are made in the document, what editing, what tricks, etc.
PK - It is certain that a consecutive documentary stage of a given thing can either enhance or spoil the original piece. However, one must realise that. We have a certain knowledge of the possibility of manipulation with these tricks. This has been quite an interesting experience. God forbid that the artists possess this kind of knowledge and the critics or art historians do not. Then there appears an excellent opportunity for manipulation as in Orwell's "Ministry of Truth". Especially if one man is both the creator of a fact and its document. Certainly, I have in mind the cases in which an impartial "transparency" of documentation is a condition of re-constructing the truth. Well, this impartiality is a utopia, one should rather say a honest "transparency". (A writing "Realizacja - film - video - scenariusz - projekt" ("Realisation - film - video - script - project" of 1988 contains more on this topic.)
MS - Let us continue the thread of documentation but in another aspect. Documenting activities and appearances of other artists.
PK - Yes, that was and still is very important because thanks to this a certain period was preserved in some shape.
ZK - Very imperfect... The motive of our documenting in the '70s was the slogan: we must preserve it. We must preserve it because it will disappear. We were conscious that everything was just ... disappearing. And we had to act as if resuscitating a victim. Well, we possess an interesting letter to the then director of the Art Institute, Prof. Starzynski in which we established the formula for our work within a certain institution as those of an "emergency unit". Having obtained Prof. Starzynski's approval we made a three-hour presentation "The Art of "Activities" ("Dzialania"), Documentation and What Next?" ("Sztuka Działan, dokumentacja i co dalej?"). We did not want to substitute for scientists, to make an elaboration of something. We wanted to act right on the spot and collect, collect, collect. Only collect. And as for the elaboration - we had neither the technical background nor the zest for it... That was not our profession. First of all we wanted this emergency unit formula. And we needed money for this, mostly for this. In 1974 we asked the Ministry of Culture and Arts to finance our activities as PDDiU; however, for years it was only the weight of the file concerning the issue that increased, nothing else.
PK - Certainly, this is still valid.
ZK - Yes, only both art and media have been changing and others have been documenting, too. And we are changing. We are not able to leave the house just for the sake of documenting something. And now, even if we are present we do not always make documentation. If we do - it is always just on the occasion, we do not go deliberately to make documentation in various places. The documentation we make is rather a continuation of the material we already have in our archives. Simply certain chosen artists. This changed situation makes a condition for documentation: if it is to have any sense it cannot be done "just because..." and it could not be a mere "preservation".
PK - At any rate, one thing is certain at the moment - when most needed we were at our post.
PART II - AT HOME
4. 2nd PERIOD (1974-1977)
ZK - There are at least two plots in the second period and these plots find their representation in our work. One of them is the further development of laboratory-like thinking, i.e. technical and formal issues. The work for this is Dzialania with our son Dobromierz crowned by a piece with "an unknown quantity x".
PK - Yes... and the theory connected with it. Since it is one of our key discoveries, perhaps, it would be worthwhile presenting its beauty here? Our son Dobromierz-Maksymilian was born in October 1972. Did I get the date wrong?
ZK - No, not this time.... The 3rd October.
PK - Thus, is there any greater unknown than a new born child?
Let us take, for example, "the output" with Dobromierz until 20 May 1974: 17 actions in our flat and about 12 "aesthetical time-results" out of each , that makes over 200. There were 12 walk-actions that produced about 60 "aesthetical time-results". Recorded on slides - this is a recording. First comes so called "sketching" on a paper, in a simplified form, which constitutes a part of "Activity" ("Dzialanie"). Next comes "Activity" ("Dzialanie") that is documented: recorded on slides. Next the slides are placed between window panes which we took off their hinges in our flat as if in a display box. That window was supplemented with commentaries, among others - our leaflets of Nowa Ruda ("PSP is degrading", "If you are a young, talented, inquisitive artist nobody will help you", "Get down to work! The enemy is quicker!"). All this, installed on a clumsy easel, was displayed at the "Studio" Gallery during the exhibition "Paintings, graphics, sculptures, non-paintings, non-graphics, non-sculptures". The piece was entitled "Logical Window".
ZK - We covered the whole in our flat with foil for the time of the exhibition.
PK - Later, for several following years, when we looked at a piece of the sky we could read slowly fading letters on our window glass: "The wheel of history breaks the artist", "Subscribe to The Soldier of Art", "What is the Arts Institute of PAN doing?".Ha, ha
MS - And what happened to your aspirations to change the world?
PK - At that time, that is in the years 1972/73, 1973/74, 1974/75 and 1975/76 we attended seminars on history, linguistics and logic by Prof. Stanisław Piekarczyk at the Warsaw University first and then also mathematical seminars on lattice theory by Prof. Helena Rasiowa and Prof. ..... Sikorski. We also attended Prof. Wojciech Gasparski's and Prof. Tadeusz Pszczołowski's seminars at the Studio of Methodology at the Department of Praxeology at the Institute of Organisation and Management of PAN. The Academy would not provide any extra-artistic, formal or theoretical background that we needed in our work during and after the studies even in the smallest degree. And it still doesn't. However, in some other places and gradually discovered sources we were able to find such a basis. Yet, the whole burden of combining that knowledge with art and artistic practice - contrary to tradition - fell on us. We were on unknown grounds and it was only gaining experiences gradually, step by step, in places devoted to the presentations of art, with the public expecting art in those places, that could provide us with an answer "if and how could that knowledge be applied for building a form or a medium. And further: what are the aesthetical, dramaturgical, expressive or 'communicative' values of this form, also understood as a means, if I may paraphrase a sentence "a means of expressing a message is a message itself". We had another objective, too: we wanted to achieve and recognise a mastership in the syntax and grammar of a certain new language in which the unknown quantities could be filled with any content for various purposes depending on a context and one's ego. We simultaneously used parts of this language, very often created "on line", as artists. Artists, but - what is important - educated. Providing information on this and manifesting our knowledge of already created aesthetics and classical rules of composition constituted additionally an obligatory parameter of our utterances. The point was to learn "what it is all about" in science and what we were doing as artists. We asked ourselves "are there any constant elements in a piece of art or in "Activity" ("Dzialanie")? " Are there any constant rules of operating like in logic or mathematics?" "Are there any rules of good design?" "Does a search for the optimal, i.e. "the praxeological better", have any universal rules that can also be applied to art? Science is concerned with processes and their effects from the point of view of "life" or production, and we are concerned with the appearance, the aesthetic value. What does our piece say, what impact does it make, what associations does it evoke? Science carries on the research to work out optimal and constant steps that lead to the final effect like, e.g. a completed house or a dinner ready at eight sharp - which can be computerised and automatic. In our case "Activity" ("Dzialanie") can appear as such by itself, "Activity" ("Dzialanie") for Activity's sake ("Dzialanie" for Dzialanie's sake) together with the multiplication of effects for the effects' sake. All just to be able to - using Tatarkiewicz's expression - meddle in this inventory already belonging to history and to be able to continue meddling. To be able to group the effects in structures or types where one can see the visual and semantic "power" of the elements of particular effects. This power is lurking potentially in an element - usually homogenous and banal - before a "Activity" ("Dzialanie") starts. Our goal was to be able to comment on the effects by means of a combination and use them as a material or warp. Certainly, the person doing Dzialania manifests "the power", too. In a performed series of Dzialania the world goes through a number of states: both of things and a human being. The developing situation can be depicted in a form of the tree. The movement on the branches of the tree is determined by such de-ontic operators as "possible", "acceptable", "obligatory" - like in von Wright... All this is a pre post-associative level.
MS -... "pre-post-associative"? What term is it? You have already used it.
PK - Well, it is from my own vocabulary, created before my graduation. Such a stage was realised in my diploma, Dzialania with Dobromierz, on plates, etc. The point is that it is enough to add one defined element to achieve the effect. Just one step is enough to make a thing speak more or less thematically. For example: if you put a stick into a piece of an orange, a tiny vessel starts its sail on nearby peels. If you add a little sail, e.g. white and red or made of a food coupon, well, this is almost a work on a theme: a PRL ship...
ZK - Well, it should rather be a half of a potato with a little rubber truncheon put in the middle and anchored among potato peels.
PK - Ha, ha! Yes, indeed! Coming back to our topic - how about a man undergoing a series of states? If we added to his "Activity" ("Dzialanie") some meaningful word or gesture?
In the applied art field, in which we include the exhibitions at PDDiU and those in our third period after 1978, we realised mostly an "after-associated" effects, skipping the sequence of Dzialania (e.g. in a live relief "A Hammer, A Hand, Ice..." or "Semantic Monster", compositions of the little "reist" theatre) or skipping "post-associative" processes as in the case of the performance "Polish Duo" I and II, "The Festival of Intelligentsia", "There and Back"; although, the narration is constructed by a "variety" in the majority of cases.
The languages of Dzialania and, consequently, the actions and their effects in objects as well as their appearances with the semantic fields belonging to them are diversified. If we add the acknowledgement of the necessity to the process, e.g. participation in art, at PSP, taking care of our son; if we also add motivational functors: epistemic, emotional, proper, normative; moreover, if we add the influence of the interests of various groups of people and individuals with which we find ourselves in a feedback relation, if we add the interests of two - then we will obtain - "The Separate Whole" ("Calostka"). The following pieces are included in "The Separate Whole":
1."Tube"
2."Having your cake and eating it"
3. exhibitions at PDDiU and our leaflet with "the starving ones", plus Oseka's essay, plus our work in the context of CDN
4. elaboration on Malczewski
5. the eagle scandal and Arnhem, plus "A Monument Without a Passport", plus three appearances at "Body-Performance"
6."the denunciation" of Cieslarowa
7. Malicki's "poses", plus "poses" next to the posters of The October Revolution, plus "poses" at the "Oferta 77", plus the final projection with 4 slide projectors at the event called "Documentation and Auto-documentation" ("Dokumentacja i autodokumentacja") at Dziekanka in 1979
8. "A Parcel for A Prisoner of Art".
"The Separate Whole" is a crowning; however, the typology of Dzialania does not finish with it. It comprises the cases, let us call them instrumental, when we add gestures (like in "Tuba") or words to Dzialania producing effects that were material-spatial objects. If we add psychological factors such as want or belief (like in Goldman) as emotional causes of Dzialania, then an intentional "Activity" ("Dzialanie") happens. This "Activity" ("Dzialanie") is understood as an exemplification of a certain characteristic (e.g. I am lively and satisfied at the moment "t" which means I am characterised by a feature: 'experiencing the lack of boredom at the moment "t"'). The need for achieving such a goal - this want - which is simply the next stage of a process; this need together with belief that a proposed "Activity" ("Dzialanie") will make it, was the reason for our appearance "How are you..." at Mospan. The achievement of the state of "experiencing good feelings" was our motive to expose the table with the unknown quantity x at the National Museum in Wrocław - in this particular place, and no other, in this particular form and no other, on the opening day. To achieve the state "experiencing a sad mood" was the objective of "Grey Paper" ("Szary papier") in Dziekanka. And to achieve the state "a satisfactory privacy during the resignation from public appearances" was the objective of some steps leading to resignation and compensation in "The Poetisation of Pragmaticality" there.
A person acting in our interchangeable Dzialania and games like in "Open Form" (on Ewa's face in the tv studio) or during a game with the public in Torun 1972 gained one or many active companions who co-operated with the person either positively or negatively. In "Activities upon the head" ("Dzialania na głowe"), or to the head, the active subject had a partner who was passive but co-experiencing. All this might happen with the third co-experiencing party: the viewers.
The feasibility of the sequence of "Activities" and its compliance with rules, i.e. the criterion of grammaticality, may depend on the performing person's talent, knowledge and abilities. On the other hand, the achievement of the goals interesting for us, let me remind you that they are different than in normal life, can follow many diverse tracks. After each step, new possibilities appear. In the process of performing our activities we move along some specific branches of the tree of behaviours, we realise a certain "state" both of the process and the effects specific only this to way. The description of the whole contains information about whether the alternatives represented by the tree appeared or not. A viewer creates such a description during the observation and he immediately makes emotional, logical, etc. evaluations. In Activities upon the head the evaluation is made by the head but it does not inform the acting person about it. In co-operation such an evaluation is active and is itself an "Activity" ("Dzialanie"): indifferent, accepting or negating sequences of effects achieved by the partner. The evaluation is expressed by deeds, i.e. a next step. I do not have to convince anyone that there is a gradation of behaviour and effect, from bad to excellent. And if somebody says that it depends on the person because, after all, we are dealing with art here not the production of a pasta factory and then the production of the very pasta, I will tell him that there certainly is one indisputable aspect: the skills and being economical. The lack of these two is usually the reason for boredom, wrong choice or over-abundance. This is not the case when we look at Chaplin acting, at Laurel and Hardy co-operating or at Phil Donahue, at Fred Astaire dancing - this is this splendour of the West at the sight of which we, Poles, lick our lips and which we are not able to achieve. Temperance, simplicity and thriftiness are the features of internal perfection that make their own impact. I would add - a magical impact. I talk about this because the reason why we are becoming national artists while working on our "Dzialania" is not only Polish "post-associations" but also undertaking of one of Polish impossibilities.
MS - Well, let us talk about the second trend in the period 1974 - 1978. The first one was, I remind you, the workshop trend - formal and theoretical. It has just been characterised. However, the initial date of the second period is marked by the appearance of PDDiU?
ZK - PDDiU was a strictly organisational matter, that is it was an attempt to solve certain problems, both our private ones and those of a group of artists. The programme of PDDiU was written at the turn of 1973 and 1974. I remember it was in our letter to Ptasnik, who was a director of the Department of Visual Arts at the Ministry. It was a letter in which we tried to categorise our work rationally and distinguish its features - documentation, such a stage or another, etc.
PK - The name PDDiU appeared for the first time in a catalogue of the "Znak" Gallery in 1974.
ZK - So, this second period started. It was a period of a certain isolation. The years 1975 -1977 meant four exhibitions at PDDiU. Thus, everything oscillated around a place where we slept, worked and led our lives.
PK - We faced a dilemma: how can an artist who has already defined his stance by his actual work and his theory, who has chosen to opt for the negation of a work of art, so for the negation of exhibitions as such, and who, finally, preferred a process - how can he agree to mount an exhibition, say, traditionally with an opening ceremony, etc.; how can he agree to a static exhibition? That was a dilemma which appeared then and had to be solved.
ZK - In the case of the first PDDiU exhibition the stimulus was external: Dwurnik's painting was due to leave Poland within a month so we decided to show it. It was "Owoce ziemi" ("The Fruits of the Earth") - a big canvas, 2.70 x 4.70m, I think. Dwurnik wanted to have it shown in Poland and so did we. There was such a possibility, we had a studio-flat in the Praga district, a large room. And, so - well, to avoid having only one, on top of that not even our own, exhibit we added a commentary to the painting. How? We wrote a text about a bottle; a text that concerned some event in our life. We entitled it "Sztuka z nerwow" ("Art From Anger")
,Tired, we slowly went down to the shop to buy some oil. We took an empty bottle and 18 zloties. The assistant: "What do you think, madam! Such a dirty bottle? We won't accept it, out of the question. Wash it first and then bring it back... remove the lacquer and the label, too. Powder is good for washing!" We felt anger in our hearts. We said: "We know and we could not say anything else. We went upstairs. We scratched the lacquer off, tore off the labels, washed the grease and we could not do anything else."
A bottle meant half a kilo of bread. The text was written in big black typeface on white cloth of the same size as Dwurnik's painting. There was a huge field of earth divided into small rhombus-shaped sections resembling so called "worker's allotments" - hundreds of miniature farms stretching far up to a high horizon. Our text was repeated in a zoomed-in version in a small field that was cut out of our cloth and glued to one of the fields on Dwurnik's canvas. That created a certain whole. We took a risk. Dwurnik did not know that it would be like that, that a certain arrangement would be make - an arrangement that would interfere with his work. Not every artist would agree to a thing like that.
PK - Our meddling into someone else's work has a long history...
ZK - Yes, the history that we called "Parasite Art" ("Sztuka pasozytnicza"). This is a separate issue. Nevertheless, a certain whole was created and that whole was labelled "Commentary Art" ("Sztuka komentarza"). The "Commentary Art" has a long history, also in another cycle which we have mentioned here. So we showed such a combination to viewers. I think that these very deeds went somehow beyond the static equilibrium of an exhibition, the untouchable character and "altar -like" status of the work of art.
PK - The point is that, one can say, "Activity" ("Dzialanie") was taking place till the opening day.
ZK - Yes, it was, however, hidden from the eye of the viewer and its effect reached beyond traditional exhibiting conventions. Moreover, it was not a group work like in the case of the Self-educating Group ("Grupa Samokształceniowa") of Wróblewski where people created one common work. In our case Dwurnik made a step and we added a next step. Again, we are in the world of a game. That was the first exhibition at PDDiU, 1975. Next was "Meyers's Lexicon"... no, I am not going to describe this. It is very well described in the invitations. Summing up - the next one, the next one, and the next one. Three altogether, on the basis of consecutive "steps" which occurred as if in a game - in time. Observing the rule of the unity of place. Each time a previous step was visible, it could be deciphered when one saw the following one. And that's what makes it a game with visible stages.
PK - Presented in a traditional way... A kind of reconciliation happened here, I mean, the whole three exhibitions were, following our theory, an "Activity" ("Dzialanie") while particular "steps" - for those who did not acknowledge that "Activity" ("Dzialanie") or were not interested in it - were regular exhibitions. In other words one could say that in static things, taking a classical exhibition as a basis, everything that had been our work in the first period was exhibited once again as well as what would be presented in the performances of the third period. Yes! However, with the reservation that in "a game" the whole process required an hour or two and in the case of exhibitions it took years. And the number of steps was small. There were also other distinguishing elements that we used, e.g. the term "Collage of content", specifically: Zosia used it.
ZK - Yes, the "Collage of content" was a commentary art treated in a free way because in that case I did not want to aim at an "Activity" ("Dzialanie") upon the documentation of Dzialania. What was important there was the combination of three exhibitions.
MS - And the subjects. I think we can speak about subjects in this case.
ZK - Yes, subjects, starting from the "Lexicon", the first of the cycle of three. Przemek said then that the point was to show a "non-avant-garde " content in an avant-garde way. Moreover, to show it on both sides. Polish avant garde did not deal with such subjects, e.g. anti-war. The "Lexicon" was a conspicuously anti-war piece. And yet....
PK - Or like the next one, against famine. That was for the avant garde, for the other side it was: do you want a socially committed art? So, there you have it!
ZK - Yes, because our government and journalists had a particular idea about socially committed art, like "graphic art that presents the atrocities of the war." And piles of corpses. The end.
PK - nd, so we got them! Certainly, it was again a cunning trick on our side. No-one could accept it.
ZK - The apogee of that lack of acceptance was during the second exhibition against famine. We made it in relation to a great event "CDN" by Sosnowski, Wojciechowski and Drabik.
In "Lexicon", the mandatory German question was linked to the important theme of the war, to the pain of "pre-deadline completion" (the rewarding of socialist realism not of the quality of the work but its pre-deadline completion) and the fact of degradation of our existence in our environment, all as enumerated in the "KwieKulik Circle" ("Kolo KwieKulik").
In the exhibition "May Universal Starvation Never Happen" ("Niech sie nie stanie powszechne glodowanie") the weighty, universal issue of famine was combined with financial, legal and moral absurdities of a new monopoly emerging before our very eyes: a group of avant-garde artists full of drive who were conceptually and medially biased were granted funds for a huge exhibition called "CDN Sztuka Młodych" (To Be Cont. - The Art of The Young)...
PK - In Poland, the formal "freedom" of art had been obligatory since 1965 and during Gierek's era "super freedom" as well as that exhibition - as well as many others - were to confirm this fact.
ZK - We proposed our installation "May Universal Starvation Never Happen" for that exhibition writing in our letter to organisers that such an important and committed topic would be certainly accepted with gladness (despite a few humble conditions we had made), especially because the main line of cultural politics of the Party supported the topic. Simultaneously, we presented one of the organisers of the exhibition, i.e. a state enterprise "Pracownie Sztuk Plastycznych" (Visual Arts Ateliers) as an example of monopolistic deviations. The enterprise was the only and compulsory manager of artists and introduced them to state clients. There was no answer to our proposal and the "opening ceremony of the starving" took place in our PDDiU on 25 July 1977 at the same time as the opening of CDN. "The Starving", a next step in "Activity" ("Dzialanie") was "added" to the Lexicon - it was covered with translucent tracing paper and "the starving" appeared among the cutlery and crockery on the table covered with white cloth in the middle of the room.
PK - We should recall the table with "the unknown quantity x". We presented a set of all possible models of placing "something" in space: at the National Museum in Wroclaw. The models lay on white cloth. This "something" was symbolised by a sign "x" - the unknown quantity, but no longer a baby - an unknown quantity. The attached instruction suggested the viewers substitute something for "x" in three, say, "happenings"...
ZK - Something that might really happen: a yolk "in" an egg, a mouse "under" a broom; something that might happen but is unusual: a cat "on" a frying pan, a baby "in" a toilet (this was done with Dobromierz) a drop of mercury "under" a hoof. Then, something that cannot happen physically but one can imagine it: Willy Brandt "in" a glass, a hanged man hanging "over" his own head.
PK - A year later, at the Malmö exhibition we showed another table with models where the unknown quantities were displayed in relation to objects in spatial situations, e.g. x1 "on" x2; x "in front of" "under"; x in fur "in front of"; x "under" "next to" the Polish flag "on" a tower. In "the starving" we put the photographs of people ruined by starvation in place of x. Plates constituted the spatial equivalent. On the table covered with white cloth, with cutlery laid out. The same year, we added another exhibition to this collection: "Using Own Child in Own Art." It broadened that peculiar "collage of contents" with defencelessness and the dawn of ruling - by means of crayons and paints over a sheet of paper and oneself... ha ha!
ZK - He means the exhibition of Maksio's drawings where he does not appear as an object, like in "Dzialania with Dobromierz", but as a creating subject. Coming back to "the starving", in our "sending" accompanying the invitation for the opening, which Oseka described in "Kultura" - you can find absolutely everything. There is little to add, one can only attempt some interpretations.
PK - Yes. I, personally, consider this the apogee of the period. For me those exhibitions at PDDiU were very valuable. Indeed, it was a crowning of that time in our style that noone did not bettered. In other words: those things worked according to our intentions and that was our great success. However, doing things like that was tiring. You had to have constant drive. It required a lot of investment. Yes, to do a thing like that you have to be in a certain process of life - you have to be in it and honestly participate in it. Why am I saying all this? To raise a question: is it possible to continue such a kind of activity? That's it - no-one knows.
ZK - Without those tensions that touched us then, it is rather not possible.
PK - No-one knows. Perhaps ... perhaps not. Let others do it. They can. From our part those were just practical examples: something was done and - it turns out - it can be continued. I simply find it a proof justifying the theory: something was done according to the theory, it was successful, there were viewers, there was interest in it, discussion, etc. The theory transformed into positive aspects of collective life. Misquoting Macbeth who said: "Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill." One can say " a thing feeding on good could have been started only with good", that is a good theory and good practice.
* * *
MS - I wonder what dominated in the second period: life or art? Ewa Kuryluk speaks about you as of a common case among pairs or artistic groups who identified life with art and the other way round.
PK - That is an academic problem. In our case "dexterity" - a non-artistic term - was the basic mode of behaviour in art, namely - "Activity" ("Dzialanie"). In the domain of "the institution of art" - using the Cieslars' term, - we created PDDiU and at PDDiU - the works related to external conditioning. I do not want to use the word "contextual" we, instead of using this term introduced by Owidzinski, used the expression "external conditions" from the very beginning. We revealed complaints and linked them with the realisation of always important and always "justified" themes. However, we did it in a "different" form - we linked art with its (thus also ours) conditions in life. "It was to refresh the themes spoiled by propaganda and clichés, to comment on and brighten reality". It was a kind of separate "bloc". We wrote about it in 1978, I quote from "Kalejdoskop" issue 7-8/1979 - this was a text "Nasza Dzialalnosc; cele, zasady, praktyki i korzysci". ("Our Activities; aims, rules, practice and benefits") - a small digression here - the original of the text was presented to the public at the VII Festival of Fine Arts at Mazowiecka Street in September 1978. ZPAP presented among the routine collective exhibition the "action" section! ... I remember Bereś received a gold medal in this section and 10.000 zloties prize for his strip-tease - like "manifestation". And we quarrelled with Marek Konieczny who was the head of that section. The argument was about the use of the term "Activity" ("Dzialanie") in that event and the selection of artists under that label. We started to feel we had a copyright to the term and its proper connotations - the section, bore an unfortunate label "Dzialania plastyczne" ("Visual Activities") which we considered an abuse. Moreover, did our installation: a table with a text and "Sztuka w biegu" ("Art on the Run") suit the label?
ZK - Behind the table with the text there was a screen, 1m x 1m. The image from the projector was an enlarged print of a rubber stamp: from the waist up we were leaning over tables and working, below the waist we were running. In the background were waving socialist banners. The caption: "KwieKulik - Art on the Run". The stamp was designed owing to an invitation from Aart van Barneveld from Stempelplaatz in Amsterdam.
PK - Finally, the quotation:
, Apart from audio-visual shows we mount exhibitions and manifestations as a separate "block" that emerged as a result of our decision to acknowledge the society's desire all over the world to let its members called 'artists' realise certain defined and ascribed to them modes of behaviour. In that sense this "block" can be called "applied art". Our activity called 'art' without the word 'applied' is not crucially different from our activity labelled 'applied art'. The only difference is the lack of an announcement-signal for the society: 'Attention, we are going to make art now' and the "expositional" consequences emerging from this lack.
We work in the following way: we take a basis that stems from our experiments with materials, space, activities, documentation, audience and our constant penetration of the latest achievements of various sciences. On this basis we put up-to-date themes - political and social, we can also link the basis inextricably with the present political and social context. Then - if the basis is a formal discovery, new, in a constant movement forward, when it illuminates with its non-thematic layer we say: A. - the whole including 'the theme" will be original, moving, capable of penetrating the viewer's indifference to the theme - a result of propaganda abuse and neutralisation of the "theme" by a hitherto applied formal commonplace which has always been its context. B. the whole, even if it does not aim at 'refreshing' a particular theme will be suitable ( and should be) for use by the viewer a piece of information that "elucidates", comments and evaluates present relations and questions of reality."®.End of quote.
In one sentence - what was the point of it. Art can be announced or unexpected. Announced art is a result of the artist's consent to act a socially accepted role - the role of an artist. It is the result of acknowledging this as a necessity; therefore, it is applied. Thanks to its linking to the context it realises point B and this guarantees the status of art. Novelty and avant-garde character are a necessary "pusher" of themes which otherwise would be a banal, a bore or a kitsch.
MS - What would you classify as belonging to this applied "block", and what as "unexpected" art?
PK - Applied art: political show at the Boguckis' Współczesna Gallery, PDDiU exhibitions, "May the Ball Firing Not Happen" at Zacheta. Later, in the following period: "Activity" ("Dzialanie") upon the Head" in Labirynt and Plan K in Brussels, "How are you...", "Heavy Complaints ...", "Activity" ("Dzialanie") upon the Artificial Head", "Polish Duo", "Semantic Monster", "Arcadia".
And with the unexpected art it is simply like that: " you just sit down and wait for art to happen" and the rest is not public. The issues of this sphere were further broadened by the theory of Artistic Money. "Grey Paper" was a curious case - an announced unexpected art. You invite viewers, create the "field" only and wait for art together with them. "The Poetisation of Pragmaticality" from Dziekanka demonstrated, in turn, the possible consequences of an abrupt change from announced art in progress into unexpected art.
***
MS - For me your third period is marked mostly by the "eagle scandal".
ZK - This was the third thing which we have not mentioned before. Anyway, let's start from the beginning since the scandal itself was the effect not the cause. Apart from "Activities with Dobromierz", our work with "the unknown quantity x" and exhibitions at PDDiU there was something else which we did not realise during the years of the second period in any ... communicative way. That is, we did not create an exhibit that could exist without our "live" authors' commentary. I am thinking of our work "Having Your Cake and Eating It" ("Everyone is Satisfied", Polish "I wilk syty i owca cala") - an activity on a slab of stone in 1974.
What was it about? Besides carving in sandstone an inscription commemorating AK soldiers murdered by the Germans - it was a commissioned work, for money, so called potboiling at PSP - we were dealing with our own art called Activities. The first letter, next a word, then we combined bigger and bigger fragments of text that appeared during carving with various elements and also with our own text written on strips of paper. This work has never been shown as a whole. And I do not even know whether there would be any sense in showing it in its present version. However, it is an important piece because this is where the eagle scandal begins. Well, we published a fragment of this work, one photograph, in a foreign catalogue for the exhibition "7 Young Poles" at Malmö Konsthall.
PK - There was a photograph in the foreground...
ZK - Maybe, we'd better not describe it?
PK - Why? For some people the only contact with art is through description, ha ha ha! So.. there was a rectangular slab of sandstone with a carved inscription "here..." under the inscription there were two blocks of clay, on one of them there was a sign "x". The unknown "quantity x". You stand behind the slab looking sadly at the quantity and on the left, in the background, there is somebody's, not ours, big plaster eagle - Poland's national emblem.
ZK - That was on the left side of the folder-catalogue, and on the right was - a horrible thing: a photograph of Przemek's sculpture, in clay. It was a sitting man whose trunk, together with the head and hands was one, oblong form, say, pretty unambiguous. A big caption on the photo was "Man-Dick".
PK - A Molotov cocktail.
ZK - We published it without any commissions here, any censorship, half consciously, half unconsciously. We remained isolated and so much on the margin of any artistic and social life that.... In one word: we published it and suddenly a reaction to our deed came from the outside, this means our work was interpreted. We should add that we enclosed a particular written commentary and in this sense this work belongs to "Commentary Art" ("Sztuka komentarza").
PK - Which art had a subtitle "Activity on the Documentation from Activities" ("Działanie na dokumentacji z działań"). Selected pictures from our documentation were commented with subtitles, material and operations on or with photographs. The works from "Commentary Art" could be hung on the walls as an exhibition, contrary to earlier Activities on slides that were a filmed action.
ZK - Yes. The exhibition at "Znak" Gallery in Bialystok in May 1974 was devoted to "Commentary Art". Anyway, coming back to our topic, these pictures with the eagle and our commentary corresponded well to our moods and our feelings. "A Bird from Plaster to Bronze in the Barracks of Fine Arts". And the photo itself was actually a fragment of a ... workshop work. The reaction of the administration to this work was a shock for us. And here started our feedback reaction.
PK - Feedback, however, no longer in the academic milieu.
ZK - No, not in academic, not in art circles, only...
PK -... only in the environment of our Polish reality in general.
ZK - Yes. And we generally started to look - I won't hesitate to say in a more mature way - at ourselves not as artists (PK adds with a stress: Polish artists), but as citizens whose rights were violated and who demand these rights of theirs. How is that possible?
- we thought. We were so shocked, so terrified. I remember when in the February of 1976 we were summoned to the Ministry of Culture and Art by a weird telegram. Certainly we both could not sleep. It was a sort of nightmare.
This happened exactly in the period of our total isolation from the milieu and current affairs of artistic life. I remember we got up, washed, ate breakfast... OK, we were going to that ministry and thought, oh, boy, will they arrest us or not? Some thoughts of that sort. As a matter of fact we did not know whether we should, whether that was a kind of a joke, or was that serious...? At the Ministry director Węgrzyn told us that we could not "represent Polish art abroad" for a few years. We were flabbergasted. Then we wandered through various offices starting with KC finishing with MSW to explain that obvious misunderstanding, that the photo had been taken in Poland and shows a room of PSP not a Gallery in Sweden where we allegedly performed "political excesses on the Polish national emblem". No result. We did not manage to convince anyone. The only thing we did was learning that the order to withdraw our passports came from the Council of the Cabinet of Ministers.
And one more interesting detail: just before the eagle scandal we had presented our declarations to join PZPR. It was about two years later that we became candidates and remained so until 1981- I and Kwiek until 1984 when we returned our candidate's ID - not party ID to make the thing once and for all clear. Really, no-one can understand why we were only candidates for so many years. The whole affair and everything that accompanied it was, as I see it now, a kind of groping for reality. Groping for real reality. Then, in 1975, practically nobody had any proofs what that reality was really like. There was no evidence. There were suppositions that there is a regime, that - this and that; however, nobody from our close environment, from their own, private, individual experience could give any example. Not yet at that time, I think.
PK - Well, let me mention here the fact that in 1970, when I went with my diploma "Hag" [Old Hag] to the Unknown Soldier's Grave during a military parade, I was arrested with my brother who was filming my action with an 8 mm camera. I was behind bars for 48 hours. The prosecutor read the indictment for me: for the attempt to offend the banner of the Polish Army and The Unknown Soldier's Grave by placing against their background an effigy of an atrocious appearance. At that time, yes... I could feel what this sphere was, the sphere of the full-time guardians of rightmindedness. Yet, this passed away, because had my period of optimism, didn't I? I should also mention a phenomenon of about the mid seventies. In some artistic circles there was a kind of euphoria connected with petty tricks played on the administration to realise a thing or two despite everything. That was the period of the Wspolczesna Gallery of Zdzislaw Sosnowski, then CDN... The period or becoming European. Suddenly, as if that was a result of the Gallery's publications - we Poles found ourselves an equal partner for the West in the field of contemporary art. Well, the matter was even more complicated. I realised all this - that possibility of a game with the administration which Sosnowski and friends tried to play. Later it turned out that Mr. Ryszard Stanislawski - poor thing - was also forced to play secretly in order to save the precious values of Polish Constructivism... However, when I recall it now, I had to go every week for half a year from Zoliborz to Brodno to call at the Militia station. That was the verdict of the court: the Militia supervision...
Coming back to our topic, was I a parasite? I presented my first individual application to the Ministry of Culture and Art as far back as in 1971. The first serious one was in 1974 - for PDDiU; nevertheless, I presented a few even before then. The first application was individual. I wrote about my diploma then and about all those inventions, postulates that they were worthwhile, and so on, and so forth. I had already taken soundings of to achieve a response. This means the whole issue had already started then.
***
ZK - If I were to sum up the second period, I would say the following: the table with the "unknown quantity x" is one thing, the second - PDDiU, and the third - A Separate Whole. In the Separate Whole we can include, among other things, the eagle scandal, plus Arnhem, plus performances with that motif in 1978.
We hardly appeared outside at all. That's the point: why did we remain secluded in our house? After that eagle scandal some people tried to invite us at first, that is our friends tried to invite us to various events. The event - after all for this kind of art that was the only form of participation! So we were invited and our names were crossed out by someone, nobody knew who. From a certain moment it was also our friends who crossed out our names. There were such big events; however, without us: in Koszalin at the turn of July and August 1977, the events organised by Zdzislaw Sosnowski at the Wspolczesna Gallery, a symposium and an exhibition of Owidzinski in Sweden, finally the above-mentioned CDN... And it was only by the end of 1977 that the milieu's boycott of us was broken. It was when Andrzej Mroczek invited us to "The Offer 77" ("Oferta 77") and asked us for to appear at the Labirynt Gallery in Lublin later, in 1978.
I would characterise this period between 1974-1978 also in other words. The reasons for our isolation make a certain chain:
1. the baby
2. the necessity of potboiling and practical contact with PSP
3. our regarding the conditions as an important element of the art of Activities
4. treating art as a reaction to the bad conditions which surrounded us, that was the source of the idea of The Separate Whole - Przemek has already enumerated the examples. The Theory of The Separate Whole makes a generalisation of all of this.
5. Our fight against PSP was an inciting force for us to make a work with an eagle. "The eagle scandal" was in turn the reason that we were on the state' "black list". The fact that our name was being crossed out on various occasions and the refusal to give us passports were the cause of our greater development and the enrichment of our "off", in other words we made our privacy institutionalised.br />
Concluding, it was the situation that forced us to undertake alternative activities (e.g. PDDiU). And it should be emphasised that we have never wanted to be on the margin, in any "alternative" whatever. Life pushed us into it. During those years our main contact with the outside world was through various letters, complaints, explanations, proposals, criticism and "sendings". While at home, "for ourselves" we made art: Activities with Dobromierz (Działania z Dobromierzem), with "the unknown quantity x", "Logical Window" ("Okno logiczne"), "AK Kinga" (A Separate Whole), "Tuba" ("Tuba"), (A Separate Whole) and PDDiU - its programme and exhibitions.
PART II - AT HOME
5. 3rd PERIOD (1978-1987)
MS - The third period is dated 1978 -1987 and is different from the previous one because then you appeared in public at various events, festivals and symposia.
PK - Yes, but I will mention two facts that break up our chronology a little. The first was on 5 March 1976 at the "Mospan" Gallery and is an important element in the "eagle issue". It is the performance entitled "How are you Mr. Kwiek? How are you Mrs. Kulik? You are Polish artists, aren't you?" Our response was immediate, reading our most recent letters: the explanation of "the eagle issue", the analysis of the unpleasant conditions for a young artist sent to the President of The Association of Polish Artists and Designers and our application to participate in the academic session "Praxiology - the application and perspectives of development" organised on the 90th birthday of Tadeusz Kotarbinski. Having read those letters we played "a work on a tape" called "The Idiot" ("Idiota") and opened a little exhibition of hard-core Swedish pornography. The second fact was "The Offer 77" at Mroczek's where I appeared alone with "poses".
MS - Perhaps a few words more about it?
PK - A few words more? Well... We documented on slides particular steps of a non-public activity of Jacek Malicki on an expressive portrait of Paweł Freisler, which as a work of art, and with an inscription "I was given some chocolate..." was published in the October 1976 "Linia" ("Line"). Jacek had brought us the script earlier. Not wanting to be mere mechanical document-makers we simultaneously did "something" for ourselves, about which Jacek did not know. It happened like this quite often. In 1972, the situation was the same when we documented Kalina's "The Eve" ("Wigilia"). I placed plasters of onions used in the action, they contrasted with the surrounding chaos. Next year a naked Dobromierz lay in the circle of onions; Dobromierz in a ZMS27 uniform in the circle of onions; a naked Dobromierz stood in the circle of onions; a baby's bottle on a black background in the circle of onions, next to it are many other circles, etc. After a few years the circle of onions was replaced by a circle of tomatoes with a great white tuba inside and three persons saluted that composition. Our writing of March 1973 sent to Argentina described it as follows: "Zofia Kulik and Przemyslaw Kwiek have been trying to document all activities that they organise themselves, in which they co-participate or which they only observe. However, they do not want only to document. After all, they are the directors of the events, or even interfere with the events occurring before the camera, microphone, a movie or a tv camera to make the plots, associations and the materials of this activity related and be a logical and thematic continuation of the plots, associations, and materials of the previous activities - already documented."
ZK - The slides documenting Jacek's activities were made by Przemek who, while taking the pictures, exaggerated the poses and gestures usually made by a photographer. I, in turn, made black and white photos of the poses of Przemek making pictures.
PK - Then, in October 1977 I re-enacted these poses while looking at Zosia's negatives in front of freshly painted propaganda panels for the exhibition "The October Revolution and Poland" ("Rewolucja Pazdziernikowa a Polska") which we did as a commission for the Lenin. I visited the "Oferta 77" in December of the same year alone - which was exceptional, moreover I did not take any camera or projector. I "documented" the works by the participants noting with words the content of hypothetical slides. In the evening I stood in front of the public. I told them I was going to make the show of documentation, however, I myself would be a projector and they, the public, - a screen. I read "the movement" of Malicki's activity from his script, e.g. "almost on Freisler's beard I pin up a red raspberry and green leaves with a pin with a blue head." Then I described "a shot" from "The Offer", e.g. "the photograph presents two halls in the Lublin House of Culture. There are big photographs on the floor that present woman's legs in recently fashionable shoes on platforms, a ball footballer's legs." - The work in question was "Goalkeeper" by Zdzislaw Sosnowski. Next, looking at a slide from "Revolution" against the light, I was describing a panel. " A banner with the inscription "Vsa vlast sovetom'" (All power in the hands of the Soviets) and, finally, I re-acted a pose in front of the panel. And so on, a next sequence. The reaction was amazing... Laughter. A guy is saying something, he describes somebody's aesthetic compositions and mostly conceptual-medial works by the present participants. Simultaneously, from time to time, he does a sort of a contortion and adds to it all the descriptions of soviet visual clichés. Ha ha ha!
ZK - Red ones...
PK - Yes, the panels were in red. In the second part, I re-enacted the appearance from Mospan - and the atmosphere became quite "merry".
ZK - The finale was in March 1979 at Dziekanka at Sikorski's "Documentation and auto-documentation". There were four slide projectors and four screens and four things were projected simultaneously: Malicki's compositions on Freisler's portrait, photographer's "poses" shot at Malicki's, poses in front of the October Revolution panels and "contortions" from Lublin.
PK - When I returned from the "Offer 77", to which I had so reluctantly gone alone, I looked and what did I see? Zosia had repainted the walls white. It was beautiful.
***
MS - Let us come back to your common appearances in your third period, that is in the years 1978-1987.
PK - We had our first common meeting in 1978 at the "Labirynt" Gallery, at Mroczek's invitation - "Art as They Wish It To Be" ("Sztuka jaka chcą aby była") based on the Activities on the head. The next two stages, that were our reactions to being refused passports to go to Arnhem - one at the Biennial of Young Art in Sopot, the second during "Body-Performance" in Lublin, were connected with the "eagle issue" although not as directly as in Mospan in 1976. Those were important appearances, that might be considered the apogee of the application of all our formalism, process, documentation and activities - already serving our utterance and reaction to a concrete social phenomenon.
ZK - Eee, we simply started to construct works. And whether they had such form or another...
PK - I agree. This work - if someone were to reject its context, reason, etc. - could have been perceived as an independent thing. It was our utterance concerning more general issues: lack of freedom, deadening expression, degradation...
ZK -... entanglement, bondage... Grzegorz Kowalski called these works "the works of dignity" in general.
PK - Yes, that is a good name.
MS - Can we call this period your "performance period"?
PK - Not only. Let us call it "the period of everything". (He laughs) A merry creation by eclectics, about which people say that they have not invented anything new but have summed up everything, all their achievement hitherto.
ZK - You can say that since 1978 we have been presenting each work in the form of a performance, but not exclusively, there is also object and installation. The work is a certain "image" of our reaction to events ("especially bad ones") which happened in the external world and which influence our life. Frankly speaking, we do not even call what we do art... Yet thanks to this we function as artists in the artistic channels. And in this sense it is art, but...
PK - Yes, yes. This says nothing about the value of the work as such.
ZK - Certainly, we make use of the previous stages.
PK - That means - I do not know whether the generalisation is good - that in the previous period there were wonderful topics and wonderful problems with which we dealt, yet there was no work. However, in the third period, one thing that is sure: there is a work of art (certainly, it had nothing to do with a closed form or a classical work-object) but it is very controversial exactly because of its topic, its content and our psychological disposition during thinking about it, during its creating, presenting, etc. Here we could make comparisons. No-one knows which period would look better in this respect.
ZK - A fight has been going on between me and Przemek for a long time. What we did in the third period, what we showed in galleries and at various events is the result of this fight: who and how much was yielding to whom. I mean, Przemek is not able to face the public completely hidden under a mask, say the mask of form. The preparation of a work is usually done well in advance, in some isolation, at home. Later it serves as a sort of a mask behind which the artist can hide, a man can. This third period was mostly about this - that we were preparing ourselves anyway. Those presentations of ours, the performances - they were ready-made things. And I felt OK, I simply felt OK in such prepared things which could be called works. While the previous activity was just a verbal convincing of someone that what we do is right, that is valuable, good and so on, and also - it was a constant telling about something that had happened but no longer was. The word became flesh - that is the Great Mystery of the Art of Activities.
MS - Is this one of your slogans?
PK - Hum, and of politicians as well. Let bygones be put in the register. The register is important - but idle talking... After all, what the hell are we doing now?!
ZK - By the end of the third period we achieved multi-performance. We were searching for solutions: how and what things should be combined to make any sense, to avoid gibberish, to make a certain whole after all - a great, complex whole. Apparatus.
PK - This is one thing, and the other - to make it congruent with our earlier theories. For example, to make a thing not a hundred per cent repetition but a step forward. And, certainly, one can say that the experience of the 70's, well, even our diplomas, had their influence.
ZK - For example our work presented at Banff Centre in Canada in the Summer of 1985. That was a performance, for the first time labelled as "multi-performance", composed of three parts. Each part had previously been realised in Poland - in a different time, different places, separately. Each part existed as a separate work. And we composed our multi-performance in such a way that the order of the parts gave a new sense to the whole.
The first part was a repetition of our Dziekanka piece of March 1985 "A Hammer, a Hand, Ice, a Sickle, a Hook, a Shadow." We were sitting on bricks, a hand raised, holding a piece of ice shaped as a hammer with a hook protruding from it which was to create an image of a sickle together with its shadow on the ice. We were sitting against the background of a drawing: little clouds and sun drawn in pastel on a paper. An electric bulb was hanging in the place where the sun was and it cast light on us and some shadow on the drawing - in this sense that the light hurt our eyes and made it difficult to see the drawing. This was the centre. On either side of this scene created by us there were objects hanging "Art in Panties" : frames for paintings 30x40 cm sheeted with canvas and dressed in women's underwear. This was the first situation after which the public is asked to leave (which had previously been announced) and the next one comes.
The second part was a repetition of a work from the cycle of "Activities upon the Head" that we had presented in November 1981 during "Krakow Meetings" ("Spotkania Krakowskie"). We included a meticulous and also very essential description of the piece in the catalogue "Activities upon the Head" ("Dzialania na glowe") issued by BWA28 in Lublin in 1985: "Two persons with heads of clay sit 5 m away from each other. Not getting up they make long, ambling steps now and then, dragging the chairs with them. They move towards the mirror on the opposite wall of a big room. In the middle of their way they meet a row of standing people. Already within the reach of a hand, the people start to model their heads. Then the persons start to move symmetrically and rhythmically towards the mirror and get closer to themselves. In front of the mirror each person starts to sculpt his or her own head. After a longer time they turn their backs to the mirror and start to push their way back in jerky movements. Now they sculpt each other's heads and their own heads too. They force their way though the people still standing in the same place with dirty hands who interfere with the already shaped and still being shaped heads. After leaving the zone of battle the persons get even closer to each other. They stick their heads together. Sealing the joining lines they push away the chairs, kneel down, lie on the floor and become still." This description had - if I am not wrong - 12 versions. It took a week, this is also a Great Mystery of the Art of Activities.... So, the middle part ends with us lying still.
And the third part: we are again lying, but in the repetition of the work "Semantic Monster" ("Poczwara Semantyczna") shown at "Nurt intelektualny w sztuce polskiej" ("The Intellectual Trend in Polish Art") in December 1984. Tied with a rope we lie holding the Polish flag with the staff broken at 90 and stuck in a kind of landscape - a painting spread on the floor. To us, in turn, was tied a staff of a huge white and grey flag, also spread on the floor, at the back, behind us, like a tail. A ventilator blows from above onto the Polish white and red flag hanging vertically from the horizontal part of the staff, so this flag is the only mobile element in the static situation.
PK - And we continue lying until the viewers realise the message of the work and go away, he he!
ZK - Yes, we lie till the very end. That is why I say how each situation began and ended to show the relation between them that occurred: we sit, sit - lie, lie. The reception, strangely enough, was very good. "Strangely" because - what can be seen even in the description - we tackled Polish issues.
PK - Except for the middle part which was universal.
ZK - And the best received was the last part, the most Polish one. We heard opinions like that, and they were not said only out of kindness. After many days (we were there for a longer time, it was a workshop) people approached us, artists of various disciplines, some ceramic artists, not hostile - God forbid - towards these new forms and said that it was very ... they did not say "shocking", but... moving, yes!
MS - Will you continue this method of creation?
PK - Perhaps, yes. The way, or method - almost certainly. The synthesis of several works occurs very often in our work. These overlapping exhibitions at PDDiU, collages, compositions, allusions... In other words, combinations of elements and processes that happened as bigger or independent creative entities, or - manipulating with components (like with the onions, Dobromierz, red rag and other things from the handy "bank" of materials in the first period.) Remembering, however, that these were not elements combined according to the rule "each one with everyone" like in Markov's model or Turing's machine, which sometimes happened in our first period. Such a procedure can be called our method of creation. Similarly to the language of Post-modernism that incorporated styles, expressions, quotations, our works did the same; however, with the reservation that the whole lexical material is only ours, even in each following presentation there is some kind of, let's call it, "premiere". Our own vocabulary of new words and "modes of application" in consecutively uttered sentences which simultaneously is the history of their existence recalled here by our will, that - in turn - has its conditions, as well... it gets swollen with time, the number of presentations or constructions and the number or "premieres". Here are some examples:
1. Poses taken during documenting Malicki's activities on Freisler's face (March 1977) juxtaposed with the panels of our potboiling work "October Revolution and Poland" (October 1977) became the framework of my appearance at the "Offer 77" in Lublin (December 1977). A repeat of "How are you.." from Mospan in March 1976 was added to it.
2. In the bag from "Complaints" (June 1978) a "golden head" from "The Thingy" ("Cóś") (March 1979) was hung.
3. At the event in De Appel "Works and Words" (September 1979) the premiere "The Light of the Dead Star"
("Światło zgasłej gwiazdy") faced the head from "The Thingy" (March 1979), under the caption "Art As They Want It To Be" from Labyrinth (March 1978). The viewer's heads were attacked by the "media", also from "Labyrinth". And we had the following things on our heads: Zosia: a bullet directed her temple, I: a drawing of a camera on a band covering my eye - elements from the opening of "Postavanguardia" at Mospan (December 1977) - and additionally, on our noses -little diamonds from "The Thingy". These elements were covered and uncovered with Zosia's yellow cones, that go back as far as her diploma (1970 - 1971).
4. n the Brussels Plan K (May 1981) Activities upon "the head" (protruding from a cube) from Krakowskie Przedmiescie Street (May 1979) which was presented to the general public for the first time, were combined with Activity "to the head" ("Dzialanie "do glowy""). It was a projection on two screens (for the first time red and white) presented to "the head". "The head" was shown two series of slides that had been presented at the Bogucki's Gallery (May 1972): "Alterations of Redness" ("Odmiany czerwieni") - onto the white screen - and - "The Way of Edward G." (onto the red). Besides we showed "the head" our premiere performance "The Monument of Coexistence in the Situation of Shortage" ("Pomnik koegzystencji w sytuacji niedoboru"), next the media from Labyrinth (March 1978) attacked the head. Finally there was the opening ceremony for two works from "Postavanguardia" at Mospan (December 1977) - without previously described elements on our heads.
5. Our appearance in Stuttgart (October 1981) had the following parts: "How are you..." from Mospan (March 1976), Activities
"to the head": a projection, as above, the second version of "The Monument of Coexistence" from Plan K, the premiere of
"clay heads" and the second version of "artificial head from the exhibition "The Garden of Cognition" ("Ogród poznania") at the MDM Gallery (June 1981).
6. A show "Marx today - elegant, up-to-date colours of fashion in Cologne - you and us, only us with clay heads here and there" ("Marx dzisiaj - eleganckie, aktualne kolory mody w Kolonii - my i wy, i tylko my z glinanymi glowami tam i z powrotem") at the Cologne's Moltkerei (September 1983). In the show there was a proper version of "clay heads" from Krakow Meetings (October 1981) combined with the presentation of consecutive steps of making a mail-art piece "Marx now" ("Marx now" - February 1983) and, for the ending, the premiere use of a white and grey flag. (ZK adds: the grey in the Polish flag came from the current fashion. We were surprised by the new fashionable colours in Cologne, which had not yet reached Poland. Black, ash, grey.)
7. "Semantic Monster" ("Poczwara semantyczna") at the exhibition "Intellectual Trend in Polish Art" in Lublin (December 1984) was composed of a painting from "A Whistling Spit" shown previously at Dziekanka (March 1984) and a white and grey flag too, its third variation. The second variation was used during a 4-part "Polish Duo I" ("Polski Duet I") (March 1984). In the finale the persons (us) were joined above their heads with a white and red flag. When the persons started to bend slowly to the back two small white and grey flags slipped from it and a white and red cocoon fell onto the ground.
8. "Polish Duo II", also from "The Intellectual Trend..." had a knot from a mail art piece "Yellow" ("Yellow" - 1981).
9. ""The Poetisation of pragmaticalily" from New York's Franklin Furnace (March 1987) was composed of the premiere ,,Activities "to the head" of a representative of the viewers" - this time the head did not protrude from a cube. There were also bars with the inscription "The Festival of Intelligentsia" ("Festiwal Inteligencji") from Dziekanka (March 1985) and the entire "Arcadia" ("Arkadia"), also from Dziekanka (November 1986). I will add that the head was that of Alison Knowles who volunteered. She was not a representative only of the audience, she was also from Fluxus. I felt more at home than at my own home, ha ha ha!
10. wo weeks later, in Chicago (March 1987) "red heads", the premiere element from Franklin Furnace, were combined with "clay heads" from Krakow Meetings (November 1981) and the whole "Arcadia" ("Arkadia")... Uff... We plan to have a static combination of many works which could be called "an apparatus". Apparatus... In the invitation for "The Starving", that overlapped "Meyers' Lexicon", we also used the word "heap" - slightly ironically. The full expression was "a heap of committed works".
ZK - The apparatus is a total conglomerate of assorted works - their fragments as well as whole pieces.
PK - There is a problem of another kind that we have always had: hanging like the sward of Damocles is the problem of how this art is to function and how our life is going to function with it as well as from it. When you do art like that, there must appear the concepts of its functioning, all embracing concepts. We had such ideas. Obviously, they have turned out impossible to realise.
ZK - For example: the work which was at the exhibition of the ASP Museum "In the circle of Jarnuszkiewicz's Studio" ("W kregu pracowni Jarnuszkiewicza") in December 1985. We were told that Stanislawski had considered buying it for the Museum of Art, but he would rather not buy it, because its form was such that no-one knew how to present the work. They would have had to hang out the banners each time, fasten them, and so on. If we had it enclosed in a glass case, it would have been the best, he would have bought it then. OK, but the merit of the matter was that we made the work in that particular way. And that construction, all those papers, racks, etc. - were an aesthetic element of the work. Similarly the fact that we could have packed the work in a suitcase and carried it here and there. That was a crucial element of our work! However, no-one said, that we would not yield and finally, it would turn out you can put it in a glass case...
PK - The customer is always right... Therefore we postulated, already in the first period, that the artist should not live on his works but have some steady employment. It was a really paradoxical statement in that milieu! The artist should obtain a regular salary (he speaks ironically). Then he is a free man. If he is permanently employed, he can do whatever he wishes!
ZK - Yet, who would employ an artist? And who would determine the tasks within the scope of his responsibilities! There is also another case, the problem of some - I would call it - philosophy of making art. Namely, there are some manifestations of art , as we said - that was not foreshadowed. There is a kind of artist who complies with the time and place, in other words - who is a disciplined person, taught at a certain moment to open his soul. This is particularly significant in the case of the performance-type presentations. Moreover, there are artists who do not do it at an appointed time and they do it without any programme, yet they appear to be artists or do something which is art' although, they often do it outside the gallery and without the public.
PK - For instance?
ZK - For instance, I am thinking about numerous activities by Tomasz Osinski about whom you cannot say he is not an artist and cannot say he is a bad artist. He manifested his artistic abilities many times exactly in "non-artistic" places in coincidental situations. There are many others. And that is where comments like: "What a pity we did not have a camera, a tape recorder, etc." come from.
PK - Yes, but in that case you have to be prepared for the consequences, as with Socrates. Fortunately he had disciples who wrote his teachings down. What if he hadn't had?
K - Yes, but is this the fault of Osinski or other artists like him that they do not have pupils? You can ask why they do not have them.
PK - At any rate, a permanent employment, or something similar, is a solution to the problem for such an artist who does not want to make works-objects. This is a certain proposition how he can function in the society.
ZK - But, who will acknowledge the artist as an artist?! The commission of experts, perhaps Mr. Chmielewski?! Thank you!
PK - Oh, let's not talk about this.
ZK - And you will sculpt shoe laces to his monument!
PK - The other thing is that no artist will agree to it because they want to see their works in the museum. An any rate the problem has not been solved to date and we are still, I think, under its influence. We still hesitate whether we should yield and start to earn our living from art, after all our names are a bit famous now, and so on, and so forth, Which is the usual course of things. Shouldn't we simply make some objects. Zosia has recently been eager to do some. (ironically:) I do not protest!
ZK - There is also a problem of an energetic-psychological nature: how one can make everything function. For example when somebody comes to us to see things, to talk, as we are doing at the moment - it is a problem for us to communicate it somehow. It isn't here, is it? We can say that it is not here. It is in a file, in a negative, it is locked, and so on. It exists in some story, in an attempt to reconstruct the atmosphere... Yes - that's it - each time we have to re-construct it. I would not tackle it. I would not tackle the task because to recreate something means to create it. And I find the repetition of this creation, the re-creation of the same thing an unnecessary thing, a boring thing, a waste of time. Simply - a thing negative in its very essence.
PK - And the preacher who repeats more or less the same topic every year, and a teacher, actor? There are many professions based exactly on this kind of working.
ZK - Sure, but let's take an actor for instance... In the theatre performance it is so, however, in film - not. A certain amount of energy, of work was invested and this man is free. Alienation, that is putting the work itself into the distance, is a condition ... of freedom, simply. It creates an opportunity of doing something more, something new instead of gripping the bygone things tightly so as not to forget because it cannot be found anywhere, because you are the only carrier of it. This is simply impossible. Impossible.
PK - I agree. Well, I think this problem was solved in world art.
ZK - Well?
PK - It was! I'm thinking of thousands of examples of the final stages of this kind of activities - they appear, they are numerous, people buy them. This is becoming a normal thing in art.
ZK - Anyway for me it is still a problem.
PK - It is a problem which has already been solved - now, there is only the question whether we should do it or not. Therefore doing these "enclosures", again, becomes an energetic problem that for me is not different from making a sculpture or painting a picture. In the energetic sense, of course. Well, sculpting or painting is even better because you create a work at the same time, moreover, what you create is a documentation of itself.
ZK - What does it mean to make a ready-made thing? Kotarbinski comes to my mind. He used to say that it means creating something in such a form that if someone else - the so-called receiver, reader, viewer - reads the work, unties it, looks at it, receives - he is not tired with the process. Because, you know, if a work, say a text, is not finished, not polished, it contains gaps, mistakes, etc., the reader has to make guesses "what did the author want..." - he starts to make an unnecessary work, simply.
PK - Yes, I do agree.
ZK - And here, in these new forms, new aesthetics, are many works that stop at certain points of the lack of polishing and force the receiver to make an effort which he should not have to make.
PK - Yes, a kind of bad metaphysics. Or just metaphysics.
ZK - And that is why the programme you propose is very dangerous. Because it leaves a wide field for frauds. (She laughs.) For the unfinished things to function. An unfinished thing is art?
PK - At any rate, we both agree that we are at the stage when we will have to do something with it. We will have to encapsulate everything in such a form which could exist without us. And this we will call a work of art in our case.
MS - Will the work be a synthesis or a compilation?
ZK - Well... That's just it, no-one knows.
PK - No-one knows because whenever we prepare various materials for "sendings" (mailings), exhibitions, etc. - we realise that any re-construction of this work is always something new. Each time something new appears. A new commentary added again, a slight change to the set and .. In other words: this kind of activity we have done so far generates an infinite number of possibilities to construct such a work-encapsulation. Yeah! This is a consolation because it is, let's say, another creative stage, ha ha - that means: a more interesting one.