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Medium czy osoba – dylematy sztuki konceptualnej na kilku przykładach

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Sobota A.

Sztuka i Dokumentacja

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2012

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issue 6

63-72

EN

My intention is to describe essential artistic strategies associated with conceptualism mainly by highlighting examples of artists associated with the Wroclaw milieu, one of whose strategies included using so called new media, that in the 1960s and 1970s were photography, film and video. This strategy opened the concept of art to the influences of mass culture, everyday life, to the issues of broadening perception and manipulating information. Confrontations and contradictions between the use of new media and classic art forms were expressed by within the milieux and by the various generations of artists causing acute polemics in Poland in the mid-seventies. First I want to focus on the arguments supporting the analysis of photomechanical media, as an essential artistic problem. In Polish art, pioneers of such an awareness were Zbigniew Dlubak and Zbigniew Staniewski. Since 1970 it was expressed in the program of the Permafo group (Dlubak, Natalia LL, A. Lachowicz) and then within other artistic groups, including Foto-Medium-Art and by Jerzy Olek. They were in touch with similar tendencies in Lodz, Krakow and Warsaw. Photomedialism preferred an objective criteria of activities and an openness towards the rules of visuality and the laws of nature typical for documentary movies. On the other hand, it could not exist without pointing at the subject of the creator and its subjective conditions. So the criteria of media and personality interweaved in artistic practice, but also appeared as antagonistic. It was best seen in the work of Natalia LL, who pointed at the instrumental blindness of the photomedialists, even though she paid a lot of attention to media issues herself. The reduction of the role of art objects in conceptual art on behalf of a person and his/her life activities required a search of the personality which often reached the broadest cultural references, associated with philosophy, religion or mythology. It is well illustrated by the artistic activity of Natalia LL and Andrzej Dudek-Durer, anchored in conceptual art and constantly developing through the confrontation of corporality and mental power combined with the language and communication possibilities offered by media.

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Dokumentowanie sztuki jako nowa praktyka artystyczna

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Dziamski G.

Sztuka i Dokumentacja

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2012

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issue 6

21-27

EN

The most tangible feature of Polish conceptual art at the beginning of the seventies was the rejection of the old language of art (painting, sculpture) in order to reach out for a new medium of the visualisation of ideas. Andrzej Lachowicz saw in this process a transition from manual art to mental art. It was a departure from autographic art, in which artists produced their own individual sign, to allographic art, in which they perform operations on signs. Mechanical registration media (photography, film) made this transition easier and lead to ‘depicturalisation’, or in other words, overthrowing painting as the main medium of visual art and, at the same time, introduced a new art language — the language of semiology. Photography made it possible to talk about art through the language of signs, not through the former language of emotions, experiences and aesthetic values. That new language, that was used more or less aptly by artists of the 70s as: Zbigniew Dlubak, Jan Swidzinski, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Andrzej Lachowicz, Jozef Robakowski and Ryszard Wasko, turned out to be a significant feature highlighting Polish conceptual art. Photography and sign mutually supported each other in the battle with the old ideas of art. A negative point of reference for the new art language became phenomenology. Phenomenologists take signs as reality, wrote Jan Swidzinski. This mistake was avoided by structuralism, which operates through a neutral and arbitral (systematic) concept of a sign. A sign has an operational character, it is used to explore reality, it also allows for the reformulation of questions posed for art. Instead of wondering about the ways in which art reflects reality, we may ask a different question: how reality is understood by art, what actions are needed to be executed for the process of understanding to take place and, finally, what limits the process? Conceptual art did not devise such a new art formula and one may doubt whether it was its aim. It changed, however, the language which we use to talk about art. It drew artists' attention to the processes of sign-posting, to how art functions in the world of signs. The artists may freely use all available signs, they may transform old signs into new ones (secondary signs), they may give them new meanings through manipulation of the context and discover more or less overt mechanisms of encoding signs that are the discourses hidden behind them. Those discoveries became a permanent contribution of conceptual art to contemporary art practice: thanks to them contemporary art appears to be different than art from before a conceptual turn. Its most important consequence, however, is replacing artworks with art documentation.

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Tautologie konceptualistyczne

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Sztabiński G.

Sztuka i Dokumentacja

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2012

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issue 6

89-95

EN

The text is an attempt to consider the character of tautological activities undertaken in conceptual art. There are two ways the issue can be approached. The first refers to the texts of Joseph Kosuth, who wrote that an artwork is a tautology because it refers to the term ‘art’. The author develops the sense of Kosuth’s statement “a work of art is a definition of art” and states, that a part of the tautological system that makes a proposed definiens of ‘art” is available for direct perception, but the other part, which is the term ‘art’ must be recalled intellectually by the recipient. After taking into account the conceptual reference, the sense of a conceptual project with a meta-artistic character becomes noticeable. Polish examples of such works are projects by Roman Opalka, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Jan Chwalczyk and Wanda Golkowska. The second part of the article considers conceptual projects, in which both parts of equal tautology are directly given. Conceptual works of this structure may either state what is “unquestionable and universally important” (as Alicja Kepińska wrote) or make a kind of sense “at the same time suggested and reversed” (Umberto Eco). The possibilities are considered in reference to tautological works of Zdzislaw Jurkiewicz, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Zbigniew Dlubak and Jerzy Trelinski.

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Zbigniew Dłubak. Od sensu ukonstytuowanego do konstytucji sensu

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Brogowski L.

Sztuka i Dokumentacja

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2012

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issue 6

55-62

EN

The article is based upon his translation of a French text published in 1994. The text was part of a catalogue featuring an individual exhibition by Zbigniew Dlubak in Maison des expositions de Genas. There were some minimal changes introduced by the author to the original work entitled “Du sens constitué à la constitution du sens.” The text highlighted the originality of the artist's inspirations: on the one hand — similarly to other conceptualists in 1960-1970 — Dłubak was interested in semiotics and linguistics. However he was more captivated by Jakobson and Mukarowsky than Ayer and Wittgenstein. On the other hand, in a similar way to some 20th century painters, he intuitively discovered the procedures of phenomenology. Dlubak's contribution to conceptual art is based on a 'structural-painterly' approach to art, which is reminiscent of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. According to this French philosopher, language signs are 'forms in blanco'. For Dlubak, a work of art is an 'empty sign', which will acquire meaning during a process which Dlubak equaled with the work of art itself. The artist suggested an original—phenomenological—concept of aesthetic experience, which was based on the idea of stepping outside 'the world of meaning' in a search for the source where the sense of art is constituted. The discovery of the process in which the sense of art emerges and understanding its mechanisms, stand in opposition to aesthetic concepts, as these aesthetic concepts find the style as the main goal of art creation and assume that for an artist a specific style represents a specific way of thinking. Breaking away from the stylistic focus and from thinking in the categories of style, is one of the most significant elements of creation according to Dlubak; a style is an ossified and fossilised sense. One of his characteristic strategies, which is aimed at overcoming the category of style, is a parallel and concurrent use of painting and photography. He underlined the overlapping of artistic and cognitive processes and by doing so, Dlubak arrived at an original concept—not very new in the history of aesthetic thought—which sees art as ‘principle to the liveliness of one’s mind’.

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Medium czy osoba – dylematy sztuki konceptualnej na kilku przykładach

Dokumentowanie sztuki jako nowa praktyka artystyczna

Tautologie konceptualistyczne

Zbigniew Dłubak. Od sensu ukonstytuowanego do konstytucji sensu