| The latest exhibition of Polish media neo-avant-garde, already displayed in some important galleries and museums in Poland, has just opened in the City Gallery BWA in Lublin. The exhibition presents three distinguished veterans of Polish media neo-avant-garde: Antoni Mikolajczyk, Jozef Robakowski and Zygmunt Rytka, who are three of the first artists practicing media, installation and video art in our country. Jolanta Mederowicz, the curator of the exhibition, in accordance with the spirit of the BWA Gallery, attempts to set the fundamental questions again rather than replace them by fashionable consternation. |
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Masters of Polish Media Neo-Avant-garde by Slawomir Marzec
The latest exhibition of Polish media neo-avant-garde, already displayed in some important galleries and museums in Poland, has just opened in the City Gallery BWA in Lublin. The exhibition presents three distinguished veterans of Polish media neo-avant-garde: Antoni Mikolajczyk, Jozef Robakowski and Zygmunt Rytka, who are three of the first artists practicing media, installation and video art in our country. Jolanta Mederowicz, the curator of the exhibition, in accordance with the spirit of the BWA Gallery, attempts to set the fundamental questions again rather than replace them by fashionable consternation. The title of the exhibition, “The Energy of Transfer,” clearly defines the particularly significant matter: what exactly is the very transfer of art? Over the years a number of answers have been formulated, and they, in altered contexts, often have a different meaning today. Beauty as harmony or loftiness; the pretence of aesthetic fulfillment or the authenticity (as painful as real pain or obscenity). Art as a call of spirit, as symbolic restitution of order, or at least as therapeutic self-narration? Art as transfiguration of fortuitousness into a drama? The end of the twentieth century, flattened by ideologies and the cult of radicalism, limited the function of art to an instrument of Kulturkampf or Baudrillard’s ideal purchase (ideal, because perfectly useless).
The exhibition is an interesting attempt to refresh the interpretation of art as energy transfer. The energy which resists its classification by the conscious mind and remains elusive sense of sensibility/susceptibility, perception and imagination, which, not until in the course of interpretation (or rather contemplation), takes shape of definite thoughts and feelings.
The late Antoni Mikolajczyk is remembered primarily as “the artist of light.” His installations or photographic experiments were, and still are, a kind of miracle play of light and brightness, an effort to reach the borderline between visible and invisible. The exact description of his works is hardly possible (but I’ve no place for it here) since any interpretation would destroy their substance—the transfer on the level of energy.
Paintings, drawings and photographs by Jozef Robakowski are presented in the confined space of the Labirynt Gallery (part of the BWA Gallery). The diversity of forms results from the fact the works come from various periods of his life as well as because they illustrate his numerous interests. Since Jozef Robakowski is one of the pioneers of Polish video art, the transformation of his own creativity considerably shaped the history of Polish video art. Thus we can see works from the cycle of formal analyses Energetic Angles, as well as from the cycle Fetishes, ironically commenting on the commonplaceness of the 80s or the record of experiments penetrating the borderland between technological world and the physiology of the human body.
Zygmunt Rytka is famous mainly for his photographic recordings of installations usually taking place in natural scenery. The work presented here, Water-Time, consists of two huge photos of the flowing water, brought to a standstill in the frames, and two films presenting the motionless duration of two stones. There are also several stones lying on the floor marked with lines and individualized by numbers. Any interpretation seems to be rather superfluous here. Everybody should experience it for himself or herself.
