RECOLLECTION OF THE LAST EXHIBITION

As an instructor I discovered that didactics, pedagogy, is a very important aspect in terms of my art practice. I also started to be more focused on introducing art practice in the local context, and on the other hand, as I am very interested in post-colonialism, I started to look for a wider context for the locality. I became fascinated with Latin American countries, specifically Argentina and its very distinct urban grid structure. Through a very deep study of South America I wanted to trace the neo-colonial structures and the dependency on the United States. What is more, I got interested in a very specific approach to conceptualism in Latin American countries in the 1960s and 1970s, which was very much focused on how information can be disseminated beyond official channels. As Luis Camnitzer (2007) claims in his book, conceptualism in Latin American countries was very much influenced by the idea of pedagogy, to educate the exploited social classes.

In May 2018 I presented in Szczecin, in a local artist-run-space,² an exhibition titled Recollection of the Last Exhibition,³ where I materialized objects that could have been used as a starting point for my explanations, for my descriptions of the alternative models that are functioning (or were planned to be introduced but failed) in Latin America, in opposition to neo-colonial power. At the opening I didn’t appear as the artist/author of the exhibition, but as a curator and co-founder of CentrumCentrum (http://centrumcentrum.xyz), an institution I created with my partner Małgorzata Mazur in 2014. And as a curator I started to explain.

CentrumCentrum is an institution, or rather a pata-institution, that imitates institutional activity. Its research and exhibition program is focused on the relation between the former periphery and the former centres of the world, in the context of economical and culture dependency.

CentrumCentrum is seeking threads from the past and tries to weave them in the present net of relations, taking into account also non-human characters—forgotten events, hidden objects—and boosting its presence in the contemporary narration.

CentrumCentrum makes publications, builds collection of objects and situations, initiates the discussions, runs workshops, translates, recycles, reconstructs, takes care of the soil, plants vegetables and collects fruits.

To reimburse the involvement of artists and theoreticians from various fields, we created the capital of CentrumCentrum. It consists of sixty-six gold bars made of cardboard, spray-painted gold.

To boost its value I used my symbolic capital as an artist, and I managed to install golden bars for three months at two museums in Berlin—the Neues Museum and the Bode Museum. They were displayed behind the glass, on pedestals, among other museum specimens.⁴ Now we can reimburse persons working for CentrumCentrum with an object that is either an artwork and a museum specimen.

Happening for a Dead Boar

The first two gold bars were sent to Buenos Aires, to Roberto Jacoby and Eduardo Costa, who (along with Raúl Escari) made a happening there in 1966 that was later titled Happening for a Dead Boar. Jacoby, Costa and Escari, influenced by Oscar Masotta, prepared a textual and photographic description of a specific happening. Then they sent it to various magazines, and journalists wrote articles and spread information about this specific art event in which famous people took part. But it never happened.

The reconstruction we made at CentrumCentrum, the first exhibition at our institution, was divided into two phases. First phase was the interview given on 9 th of June 2017 in Radio Szczecin. I spoke about CentrumCentrum, its goals, and about the idea of the original Happening for a Dead Boar, how it refers to the problem of dissemination of news by media, censorship and distortion of information. Then I told the listeners about the reconstruction event that took place at CentrumCentrum. I said that a lot of people took part in the event, because they were interested in the title: boars are unwelcomed in allotments because they destroy the plantings. I also described how people, during the reconstruction event, were deeply interested in the idea and meaning of the original piece and its socio-political aspect. What I was reporting on the Radio Szczecin didn’t happen. It was only a report on the perfect event, how we would like it to look.

The second phase was a real event, a month later. We wanted to see how it would actually look. Only thirteen people took part. Two of them came from a different allotment, intrigued by a poster hung on the allotments’ notice board, and two other persons came from the city—we didn’t know them, they got interested in the event by an ad in a local culture event internet portal. The others were friends, students, people we knew.

The reconstruction was presented to the audience in the form of a radio drama. First there was the interview from Radio Szczecin. Then an article from El Mundo magazine from 1966, translated into Polish, was read.⁵ Afterwards there were audio messages from Roberto Jacoby and Eduardo Costa. Eduardo for example said he was happy that the happening that didn’t happen in Argentina in 1966 would not happen again in Poland in 2017. The whole reconstruction is documented in the form of a booklet and cassette.

Collection

The collection of CentrumCentrum can be situated in the institution or outside. It can be appropriated from other institutions even without their knowledge. One of the first acquisitions in CentrumCentrum’s collection was a stone collected from the land-art piece Spiral Jetty made by Robert Smithson in 1972. In 2016 the stone was purposely thrown into a meadow near the Polish-Belarusian border and is permanently situated there but still part of the collection.⁶

In 2014 we travelled across the U.S. Just before departing for the road trip we visited the Jewish Museum in New York, where there was an exhibition reconstructing the Primary Structures (curated by Kynaston McShine) exhibition that took place at the same institution in 1966. The reconstructed exhibition involved a model of the building where the Jewish Museum is located, with models of the sculptures presented at Primary Structures in 1966. After arriving on the other side of the country, we met with a friend in San Francisco, the artist Andy Vogt. He told us we should definitely go see the exhibition at the Jewish Museum when we got back to New York. We told him that we had already seen it, and it was fantastic. It appeared that Andy was responsible for making all the models of the minimalist sculptures. He gifted us a model of the Cryosphere that Robert Smithson made in 1966. It is now part of our collection.⁷

There are some items in the collection that don’t have any material substance—for example, Accidental reconstruction of the happening Inversión de escena that the Chilean art group Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA) made in 1979, which took place in front of the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago. In the original action, eight milk trucks left the Soprole dairy to drive through the city of Santiago according to a previously planned route, which ended at the museum, where the trucks stood for hours forming a long line. The route symbolically connected the dairy, a milk-producing factory, with a conservative “art factory”, the museum. This connection was reinforced by closing the entrance to the museum by covering the façade with a large white cloth. On Google Street View we found a photograph by Ricardo Vasquez, who accidentally photographed a truck transporting gas, also in front of the same museum in Santiago. It is the same place where the milk trucks stood. Yet in the accidental reconstruction, the gas truck is duplicated by a Google algorithm and eventually we see four trucks in the photograph.⁸

The Power of Recycling

In 2017 we established a collaboration with Munandi Art Studio (MAS) in Ndeke Village Meanwood in Zambia. We were fascinated by a project of theirs from 2015. They invited Zambian artists to discuss for two weeks the influence of Western contemporary art language, specifically Conceptualism, on the Zambian art scene, and created sculptures made out of recycled materials.

We decided to establish a collaboration involving a group of Zambian artists and students and artists from Szczecin. It would take the form of a game. The principle was as follows. The artists from MAS created the installation, a photo of which was sent to CentrumCentrum. Then, based on this photograph, the artists gathered in Szczecin, realized the installation, referring to the one created in Ndeke and sent the picture to the artists from MAS. On the basis of the photo they received, they modified their installation, and then they sent a photo of their refreshed sculpture to Poland so that the CentrumCentrum’s group would be able to respond with a photo of their modified installation.

The relationship that was established with this remote institution was possible thanks to internet connections. We’ve never really been there. Nevertheless, the metal structure that the artists from MAS created, as a result of a correspondence game with the collective from CentrumCentrum, was changing its shape. At some point, it was intentionally set on fire by a stranger. The image of a large burning metal structure covered with tires, which resembles a huge egg in its shape, caused a very strong experience in which the feeling of real effect made on the object situated in the long distance, combined with a sense of sadness and fear that the installation was deliberately destroyed by someone. Somewhere, very far away, in a different territory, a great sculpture with which we have a direct relation is subject to spectacular destruction. Do we feel the same when we think about gigantic grooves in the earth, in mines located somewhere there, out of which so important raw materials, decisive for the scale of the modernist enterprise, come from?

The Crystalism

On 29th of June 2019 we organized an event titled “The Crystal”. As part of it we translated to Polish The Crystalist manifesto. It was written by Muhammad Hamid Shaddad and published in 1976 in cultural magazine Al-Ayyam. The manifesto was also signed by Hassan Abdallah, Hashim Ibrahim, Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq and Naiyla Al Tayib.

Crystalism is an extremely sophisticated and radical aesthetic and philosophical proposition. It breaks forms and structures imposed by the authorities. Blurs the boundaries between nation states, objects, time and space, animate and inanimate matter. It allows us to look at the essence of things, woven from a network of relationships, in order to burst it into another semblance in the next moment. According to Crystalism, reality is a result of transparent reflections of semblances and essences. Pleasure is, however, the only category that connects us with reality. It is pleasure that motivates us to all actions. Pleasure mediates in the exchange between us and the world.

In 1975, Hamid Shaddad showed his audience the Crystal installation, which consisted of 18 cubic blocks of ice (120 x 20 x 20 cm) and plastic bags filled with water colored in various colors. Earlier, while still studying, Shaddad carried out excercises, that could be treated as a prologue to the idea of Crystalism: he would watch movies at the cinema, but focused only on the color and light layer of the films presented, deliberately not paying much attention to the story or he would be looking closely at changes in brightness and shadows, movement and colors of the constantly changing river current. As a result of this last exercise, was the recognition of the “Blue Nile” as a work of art for a period of a month. The “Blue Nile” is a constantly changing system in which there is an infinite number of relationships between bacteria, seaweed, stones, fishermen, tourists, water, fish, trees, ships, ports, transported resources. Between the elements of the system, momentary essences are formed, which after a while are transformed into another one. The river drills, waters, lifts ships and logs of wood. By saying “river” we define this system as a single expression, but its essence is extremely numerous and stratified. The essence of the river is elusive, at every moment, for different viewpoints, for each element of the system, it appears in the crystalline, transparent interpenetration of changing relationships.

The Crystallist’s manifesto general idea is that the world is based on contradictions, there is no stable essence, or truth. Reality is a system that always changes, in which there is no clear boundary between the human and non-human elements. Anthropocentrism is an obsolete proposition, and the Crystallists sets our senses and mind to a much more egalitarian, non-authoritarian relations.

We believe that the crisis lies originally in the old unit of measurement, for philosophy and the empirical sciences make man the unit of measurement, which leads to a dead end. The solution to this contradiction is to resurrect the essence, not the semblance, as the unit of measurement. Man’s essence is pleasure, and that should be the sole unit of measurement everywhere, including in the sciences, philosophy, and art—there is no other criterion.⁹

Art and Life

In the early 1970s, a Polish theoretician and curator Jerzy Ludwiński wrote that when the borders of art exploded, the search for new, yet unknown tendencies in art is no longer the goal. Now it is much more important to think how we could communicate art among us. When the border between art and life is blurred, the art movements, styles will not help us to better understand the nuances of the artistic proposals. Each artist creates his/her very specific language, which is different from any other. And this makes the “string” attaching the artist with the audience much, much longer. The artists’ attitudes become the matter of art. As Ludwiński claimed only telepathy could transmit the art between the individual and the society. This tension between the individual and the social was always very present in the artistic practice. By looking on various artists in different geographical locations in the 1960s and 1970s, we can point at least three different aspects of how art could have materialized in a social body, in different political contexts.

In the U.S. the 1960s was a time of revolution, when artists (with the marginalized groups of society) fought with the capitalist status quo. Some of the artists (like Robert Smithson or Hans Haacke) and curators (like Lucy Lippard and Seth Siegelaub) expressed their lack of trust to the institutional structures of big museums and galleries, which for them were corrupted with elitist formalism, and to the art market, which treated the art object as a fetish. Their answer was to disseminate art objects through art books, texts, in a horizontal, non-hierarchical way. As a result, the artist would become more like a regular citizen, a member of the society who distributes ideas, than a chosen one who decorates the interiors of corporations with his/her unique paintings.

Since the 1960s most of the South American countries like Argentina, Brazil or Chile were ruled by military dictatorships. They gained power with the help of the United States’ government and corporations, that feared of losing control on the resources and labour of the Latin-American countries. Great part of the artist’s practice was focused on opposing the capitalist invasion. What is important is that the art was practiced in many cases collectively, what goes with the belief in the communist ideas. Artists connected with “Tucuman Arde” project in Argentina used a medium of exhibition in order to distribute informations to the people via uncensored channels. Their individual aspirations where rather unimportant. Artists where among others (philosophers, journalists, sociologists) part of a militant ensemble. Chilean artists gathered under the collective “Colectivo Acciones de Arte” practised art in the public space. They were blurring either the border between the art institution and the street, or between the artists and the other members of society. As Luis Camnitzer claims in his book “Conceptualism in Latin American art: Didactics of Liberation”: “[…] making art, at least in its formalist version, stopped being the real issue. The aim became to organize a receptive [ and critical [Ł.J]] community, which is a political issue.” (CAMNITZER, 2007, p. 20).

In the countries of the Eastern Bloc, like Poland or Yugoslavia, the communist regime (and in reality—a dictatorship of the party), was an operating ideology. Officially everybody was equal, yet everybody was also controlled by the bureaucratic system and e.g. some citizens couldn’t travel abroad. The oppressiveness of the regime was different in each country of the Eastern Bloc, yet in almost each of them we might find similar approach among neo-avantgarde artists in their practice. On the one hand, there was a need to be part of universal language of the Western (capitalist) culture or the world in large, much more than to be part of Social realism movement in a local, communist context. Through many occasions Eastern artists exhibited with the Western, or exchanged mail art with them. The project of Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski “Net” (1971) was based on the idea of creating a mail network with artists from around the globe, mainly from the West.

On the other hand, there was also a great tendency to escape the severe reality. Artists did practice art outside of the big cities, within very small groups of people to a small audience (like Collective Actions Group in the Soviet Union) or acted unnoticed without any audience (like Gorgona Group in Yugoslavia). In many cases where officially the neo-avantgarde art practice was forbidden (like in Czechoslovakia), artists exhibited or presented their works in private apartments.

One of the most distinct aspects of the art practice in the 1960s and 1970s in that particular region is the need to locate your individual existence within a small group of people, and intimately escape the oppressive system, by practising neo-avantgarde art. As one of the members of Gorgona Group (Josip Vaništa) writes:

In 1961, Gorgona Group was fleeing from then-powerful Communism to the irrational, incomprehensible. Gorgona Group’s inaction was noticeable. A few young people whose mutual affection was the decisive factor for connecting met occasionally. Gorgona Group did not have a message! It was a particular type of action, self-ironic, it gave off a feeling of strangeness. Maybe it brought something new, maybe it only resolved its problems in life, anxious feelings. Maybe it did not leave behind anything but friendship and spiritual kinship. […]

Gorgona Group’s aspirations were oriented towards a reality outside aesthetics. Reflective restraint, passivity and indifference were above the naked, ironic denial or the world we lived in. No importance was attached to work, activities were very simple: going for walks together outside town, for example, ‘commission inspection of the beginning of spring,’ as Putar used to say jokingly, ordinary conversations in nature. Sometimes, Gorgona Group did not do anything, it was only living. Like the others, I was interested in the emptiness of Zen at that time, I sought normal behavior, normal life in an ideologically imbued world. (apud DENEGRI , 2013).