Artykuł stanowi próbę wydobycia treści filozoficznych zawartych implicite w niefiguratywnym malarstwie Henryka Musiałowicza. Jest to malarstwo wolne od treściowej narracji. Tkwiące w nim emocje, rozwiązania formalne, skojarzenia, kolorystyka składają się na proponowaną w tekście tezę o potrzebie utworzenia swoistej hierarchii wartości. W miejsce panującej współcześnie aprobaty dla ich równorzędności (zrównania) Musiałowicz ukazuje malarskimi środkami tęsknotę za transcedencją, za dążeniem “wzwyż”.
Troska o czystą jakość w sztuce, nieprzekładalną na kategorie ilościowe, oraz dążenie do jej osiągnięcia we własnych dziełach była aksjomatem twórczości Wacława Taranczewskiego, jednego z najwybitniejszych polskich artystów współkształtujących klimat malarstwa drugiej połowy dwudziestego wieku. W drodze do poszukiwanego eidosu sztuki Taranczewski tworzył monotematyczne cykle obrazów, jakby sprawdzając w sposób empirycznie uchwytny estetyczne możliwości malarskiej formy. Trudne do odtworzenia i w estetycznych analizach często pomijane meandry poszukiwań Artysty zostały przedstawione w eseju w sposób głęboki i szczególnie intymny; nic dziwnego, jego autorem jest syn Wacława Taranczewskiego, jednoczący w swej osobie kompetencje filozofa i praktyczną wiedzę czynnego artysty.
Pogłębiający się ciągle proces intelektualizacji oraz instytucjonalizacji sztuki współczesnej doprowadził w drugiej połowie dwudziestego wieku do powstania jej nowej mutacji, którą można określić mianem metasztuki. Chociaż ugruntowane w artystycznych faktach, rozróżnienie między obszarem sztuki i metasztuki nie jest łatwe, bowiem przedstawiciele tej drugiej starają się zatrzeć demarkacyjną linię podziału. Autor przedstawia własną propozycję takiego rozróżnienia oraz uzasadniające je kryteria.
Jeśli zinterpretować jedną z ważnych realizacji Izabelli Gustowskiej - W podróży, z punktu widzenia istotnej roli, jaką odgrywają w niej elektroniczne media, to okazuje się, że do ukierunkowania interpretacji można użyć mitu Chimery. Odczytanie tego mitu, pozwala w obcowaniu ze sztuką Gustowskiej, dostrzec inny rodzaj złożoności i wewnętrznej motoryki, niżeli te jakościowe wyróżniki, które wiążemy w sztuce z rolą muz i Pegaza. Intrygująca nowa jakość, wniesiona w dzieło, za pośrednictwem nowych mediów, zdaje się łączyć z mentalnym powrotem i wskazaniem starego mitu, patronującego teraz nowym urzeczywistnieniom artystycznym. Współczesna atrakcyjność i aktualność Chimery może być poszukiwana / odnajdywana nie tylko w pracach badaczy mitów, ale sygnalizowana jest też przez autorów, którzy w oryginalnych nawiązaniach do tego mitu - z racji swej profesji - wypowiadają się o sztuce z poznawczo poszerzonych pozycji, innych niż jej zawodowi reprezentanci: estetycy, filozofowie sztuki, krytycy artystyczni.
EN
Myth of Chimeras leads us in a revealing a manner of an interpretation of one of Izabella Gustowska’s important artistic realisation (In travel), in the context of a role played by the media. In relations with Gustowska’s art this myth permits us to perceive other kind of complexity and internal movement, than these qualitative distinguishing features, which we associate in art with a part played by muses and Pegasus. New intriguing quality carried out in her work is due to an agency /mediation of new media, uniting with mental return to an old myth, patronising new artistic executions now. Current desirability and topicality of chimera can be traced not only in the works of the explorers of the myth. It is visible also in works of artists, who in original relation to myth express their own attitude in art so different from that of professional explorers: aestheticians, philosophers of art, art critics.
The article discusses the critical reception of an exhibition of contemporary Latvian art opened on 28 March 1936 in the showrooms of the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Zachęta). The Latvian show was part of a sequence of official art exhibitions of national states, which during the interwar decades functioned faultlessly and linked the central and peripheral centres of the Old Continent into a thick network of exchange. Its reception by Polish authors of reviews exemplified a striving characteristic for the cultural discourse of the 1930s, aimed at capturing in the fine arts certain symptoms of national identity. The presented text is based on a confrontation of several viewpoints concerning the exposition: the perception of Warsaw commentators unfamiliar with the details of transformations transpiring at the time on the Latvian art scene, reflections by Latvian theoreticians of art during the 1930s, and narrations by contemporary historians of Latvian art. An analysis of the exhibition scenario (determined by the cultural policy of the then recently politically constituted Baltic country) and the semantic and morphological qualities of the works on show at the Zachęta defines “national art” and “national style”, and verifies the possibilities of translating critical-theatrical rhetoric into purely art values.
Anus ebria is an image founded on anti-ideas, clichés that break or openly violate the cultural taboo, such as women’s drunkenness, sexual freedom, or emancipation from norms moulded by tradition. In its capacity as a jeering and comic “divulger” of norms and principles it becomes one of the more characteristic signs of the “eschatology of inebriation”. This is the case not so much of an “old drunk” as of an “old rebel”. In its visual and logistic dimension it assumes the form of a lascivious and old drunken woman, whose vulgar behaviour is a distinct reversal of the natural state of being desired by society.
This text deals with the “archival turn“ and discusses one of the most important Polish private collections of avantgarde art formed since the 1950s by the leading conceptual artist Józef Robakowski. The author’s point of departure is the assumption that the purpose of collecting is the creation of a canon of cultural values, and thus that collecting is the outcome of selecting and systematising facts/objects according to a priori established rules; for this reason it only ostensibly possesses all the features of neutrality. Actually, no collection is neutral since it personifies power inscribed into accumulating, collecting, and gathering as well as encyclopaedic order and rules of the language (Alan Sekula). Private art collections are the effect and image of individual passions, predilections, sometimes manias and obsessions, and build closed and stable testimonies of cultural identity. Archives-collections established by artists are a special case since they are part of artistic strategy, are enrooted in art, and perform work associated with creativity. This fact discloses a certain performative quality of the collection/archive linked with the generation of a private iconosphere, a Derridean “domesticated” archive that constitutes the discourse of the artist-collector with, and about art, also within the domain of “pure” art, which is already only one of the possibilities of artistic strategy. The discussed exhibition was the product of the “domesticated” art collection amassed by Robakowski, and in this manner it builds inter-textual space, ambiguous and connected with its re-[de]-contextualisation. The Robakowski private collection/archive is a conceptual game played with cultural paradigms, originating from the conceptual art of the 1960s and its anti-authoritarian stands conceived as the “great refusal”. The manner of its distribution is part of the conceptual order as a form of artistic organisation and production. At this stage essential questions are yielded by the comprehension of conceptualism by artists living in communist Eastern Europe, where the purpose of conceptualism was not “refusal“ but the involvement of art as a critique of the regime in which it was embedded. This is why the “museum-archival” project proposed by Józef Robakowski, and entailing the collection of objets d’art and documents, focused on memory and history, together with faith in the reanimation ability to “revive” the source and “recreate” the inaccessible past.
With the concepts of mise-en-scène, event (Mieke Bal), archival turn, and preposterousness as its points of departure the text embarks upon an extensive interpretation of the newest project by Alicja Karska and Aleksandra Went, who working together often undertake the problem of recovering for culture that which is forgotten, omitted, and excluded. The author took into consideration the fact that the performative dimension of the art studio is included into the museological order together with its ritual of forgetting and recalling: the studio is a repository of objects awaiting their disclosure and introduction into social space, ergo, to be given a new life. The Karska & Went project: Franciszek Duszeńko – Monuments is about an unknown sequence in the oeuvre of Franciszek Duszeńko (1925-2008). The authors of the exhibition extracted from his studio-refuge a dozen small abstract sculpture forms and by treating them as a sui generis archaeological finding transferred them into a specially constructed architectural space, i.e. models imitating museum or gallery interiors of the white cube type. In this way, they staged a mise-en-scène: a model of a museum/exposition situation in which a fragment of the artist’s studio conceived as non-space, i.e. that which is found on the peripheries of the existing orders, has been subjected to institutionalisation and engaged in a construction of a fictional museum/gallery. The essence of the applied artistic strategy is preposterousness: (neo)avantgarde sculptures, traces, documents, and relics pertaining to a certain moment in the artist’s oeuvre are seen from a present-day perspective and subsequently cited. In this fashion they become a contemporary product, causal for making another work of art. Applied/cited in present-day artistic praxis they attempt to solve the way in which, and reason why works of art from the past are always perceived as re-vision mediated by the horizon of contemporaneity. The quotation strategy employed in this assemblage is associated with interpretation and thus with conceptualisation. In other words, it is preposterous. This is also the objective of the Karska & Went project: the creation of a trans-historical artistic (cultural) situation that rejects the radicalism of divisions and severances in the history of art. The diverse strategies applied by Karska & Went: anachronism, preposterousness, mise-en-scène, mise-en-abyme, montage, collage, and quotation served the establishment of a new relation between the history of art and its present-day experiencing.
The objective of this text is to demonstrate fundamental differences in comprehending a scandal at the end of the nineteenth century (E. Munch, Madonna) and the scandal strategy in contemporary art (M. Cattelan, La Nona Ora / The Ninth Hour). In the first case an unintended scandal was the outcome of a philosophical stance adopted by artists questioning Cartesian tradition as well as of the use of Expressionist means, considered shocking at the time. In the second instance, the deliberate creation of the scandal strategy assumed the relegation from the discourse about the artwork of all aesthetic and formal deliberations as well as stirring a barren publicistic dispute, which only creates the appearances of a philosophical clash. A context indispensable for the success of such a devised provocation is the ritual chaos prevailing in the media and a milieu of art critics dominated by “political correctness”.
Sculptures by Igor Mitoraj comprise a sui generis bridge spanning over more than 25 centuries of European art. The pillars of this bridge are composed of a great triad of figures: Doryphoros by Polyclitus, designed as a demonstration of the artist’s Canon, David by Michelangelo, and Icarus by Mitoraj. In aesthetics the pillars of this edifice are philosophers representing three different epochs of reflection on art: Plato, Plotinus, Ficino and contemporary postmodernists. Three statues and three different conceptions of beauty captured in stone symbolise three epochs in the history of art: antiquity, the Renaissance, and contemporary art from the turn of the twentieth century.
Oto pytanie, które tu podejmuję: czy w swej istocie proces tworzenia polega na wykonywaniu czy na odczuwaniu, po której stronie dokonuje się twórczy akt artysty? Bronić będę prymatu odczuwania („od-czuwania”, brak mi lepszego słowa). Twierdzę, że w sztuce (jeśli nie „w ogóle”) podstawowym, właściwym elementem procesu twórczego jest zawsze odczuwanie, także wówczas, gdy splata się z równoczesnym robieniem, ze sporządzaniem czegoś.
EN
This is the question I undertake: does – in its essence – the creative process consist in performing or in-feeling sympathy? On which side is one to locate the creative act? I shall defend the position of the in-feeling (the lack of a better form). I state that this is the most primordial attitude not limited to art only.
Punktem wyjścia jest zaniepokojenie związane z zanikaniem fundamentów kultury europejskiej. W paradygmacie klasycznym artysta pracował na bazie idealnego obrazu w swej duszy. Ta wizja została odrzucona. Nowożytność zaproponowała ludzkości racjonalizm, wolność i równość. Efektem tych dobrych intencji jest psychodeliczny bazar. Człowiek idąc w nim jest zdezorientowany, a jego odczuwanie doprowadzone do granic wytrzymałości. Ta wykorzeniona istota skazane jest na kulturalne tułactwo. Ucieczką od tego impasu jest powrót do pytania Archimedesa o punkt oparcia i zastanowienie się nad tym, co w ludzkiej naturze niezmienne a co przypadkowe i przemijalne.The Classic Pattern and Mass Man as Interpreted by the Contemporary Theorists of Society and Culture: Daniel Bell, Allan Bloom, and Jose Ortega y GassetSUMMARYThe starting point for the analysis is an anxiety associated with the vanishing of the foundations of European culture. In the classical paradigm, the artist worked on the basis of an ideal image that s/he carried in his/her soul. However, this vision was rejected. Modernity offered rationalism, freedom, and equality to the humankind. The result of this fundamental change is the so-called “psychedelic bazaar” – a certain form of culture continually offering new, surprising and often extreme experiences. By following them, a person is disoriented and his/her feeling is driven to the breaking point. Consequently, s/he is like an uprooted being condemned to cultural wandering. The way out of this impasse is to return to Archimedes’ question about the point of support, and to ponder over the invariable in human culture and the accidental and transitory.
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