|
 |
Anna Solbach
Slawomir Marzec, Everyting. Courtesy of Gallery XXI.A huge pane lies on the floor just after the threshold of Gallery XXI in Warsaw. It was cracked several times—a bang informed inattentive visitors about its existence and about their inattention too. Its size responds with the partition-wall screening the gallery bureau rooms. The space is inaccessible, but it is the source of music: famous soprano opera arias. The partition-wall is covered by thousands of words, everything of a different size. But one of them, the biggest one located in the center, is hard to perceive. Thousands of newspaper cuttings, photos, and quotations including the word “everything” hang on the wall around a black pulsating screen. The artist has been tracing the existance of “everything” in our culture for almost two years.
There are also two large paintings on the sidewalls. They represent two painting cycles, which have predominated in Slawomir Marzec’s creativity in recent years. One of them is built as a mixture of all colors, concluding in the dirty grey of total unification. The second image is a fragmentation, which came into being through the stratification of the innumerable quantity of small dots of all colors. Marzec’s text considering the paradoxical history of the notion of “everything” hangs near the door. It is repeated on both sides, however one of them is reversed and illegible. There is also a chair covered with the inscription: “my kitchen chair on which I used to spend long night hours. This part of the exhibition is ‘borrowed’ from Zbigniew Warpechowski`s performance.” Warpechowski is probably the most important Polish performance artist, who one year ago placed his kitchen stool in front of an audience for several minutes.
This installation is titled Everything and is constructed by oppositions—symbols and symptoms, pathos and irony, overflow and the unnoticeable, schematic and idiomatic, and so on. The game of oppositions suggests that our everything is in fact based on the economy of our attention and care.
Visual artist, Slawomir Marzec is not only a professor at the KUL University and at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, but also a theoretician and art critic. Recently he challenged the art world’s model of functioning according to the rules of market and mass media. This vision of art is one of depragmatization, or active disinterestedness. Depragmatization immunizes us from the flow of current issues, demystifying dumb interests. Its consequence should be art as an individual maturation.
According to Slawomir Marzec everything is the most idiomatic and paradoxical word, which contains both nothing and… everything. Is it a notional anomaly, or just the basic call? Or maybe it is the secret protecting every “something” from its final instantiation?
