City as Open Book
Slawomir Marzec
In the late autumn
1975 inhabitants of German village Kleinsassen were agitated by sudden message:
stranger arrived. The stranger set a tent (which during winter became an igloo)
in ruins of monastery and began its reconstruction alone. All sorts of guesses
and rumors on his subject circulated in the neighborhood, however nobody supposed,
that he would be their master and art would become the sense of their life; and
even profession for some of them. Few years later Gerard Blum-Kwiatkowski was
directing the Kunststation Kleinsassen, which means: the gallery, small museum
of abstract art, venue and school of art, which assembled over 200 adepts.
He began his artistic
activity in the 60s with transformation of church ruins in Elblag into one of
most important in that time gallery “EL” in Poland. After moving to
Germany, he did the same in Kleinsassen, Fulda, Hunfeld, and Swieradow Zdroj.
Few times, after a dispute with local authority, Blum–Kwiatkowski abandoned
everything and begun totally anew. At present he leads Kunstations (with considerable
Museum of Modern Art) in Hunfeld and Swieradow Zdroj.
Since almost 4
years Blum-Kwiatkowski has been transforming the small town Hunfeld into “Open
Book”. He depicts on the walls visual poetry projected especially to concrete
place by invited artists (for example Klaus Groh, Ryszard Winiarski, Anders Linden,
Yve Ning), philosophers and politicians (Vaclaw Havel). The inhabitants consult
given project, which then becomes their special “visiting-card” overcoming
the anonymity of architectural standards. Now there are over 80 such realizations
of authors from the whole world; often written in their native language. And
every year several new pieces appear. Being in Hunfeld you can get a special
guide, a kind of content list of the “Open book”, according to which
you can walking read it.
The reflective
or sometimes contemplative aura of the artworks competes with commercial and
political advertisements of urban space. The artist compensates in this way the
present sensibility of twinkling intensifications and the mentality of punctum
(R. Barthes). Writing down concrete text in concrete place he supports such experiences
like personality, durability, stability and slowness. He tries to situate art
between utopia, vision and “passers-by`s world”.
Blum–Kwiatkowski is fascinated by the spirituality of geometrical art –
from Malewicz, Kandinsky, and Bauhaus to conceptual art and its new formulations.
For many years he is developing his own meaning of reductive art, where –
in shortage – objectiveness of art piece states only introduction to essential
experience. Through his own art works (paintings, objects, installations) he
tries to reduce impressions and create the place for thoughts and feelings missing
in our ordinariness; to reveal the mystic of minimal forms.
