Venus from Kozienice
by Slawomir Marzec
Dluzniewski is the Nestor of conceptual art, though he always was far from orthodoxy. Some years ago he was blinded in car accident, but he didn’t surrender–he still creates sculptures, texts, and also teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Many people are amazed by this fact, but for me this is a confirmation of the idea that art is not a game of pure sensuality.
The "Venus from Kozienice" is a white/gray marble, about 1.7 meters high. In two places it is broken and filled with two organic forms, though not visible at first glance. I appreciated this artwork, but any theory of arts, any interpretation, any social right etc., would not induce me to look at it longer. So I went away and… I did not suppose that after few hours I would return (running), to look at it point by point. This story is the reason for the return:
About 40 years ago, Dluzniewski, as a student, walked through the streets of the small town Kozienice. Crossing near a site of road construction, he noticed two vertebras from a human spine, and he hid them jauntily in his pocket. Recently, already as blind man, he found them in one of his drawers. Feeling the need for repentance for the original possession of the bones, he decided to find their "story." A pathologist qualified these bones as fragments from a skeleton of an approximately 22-year-old woman. He also located their approximate position on the spine. Another friend familiar with Kozienice informed Dluzniewski that a Jewish cemetery had been in the area of the construction site. It had been destroyed by the Germans at the beginning of Second World War. The artist reconstructed slowly, also in his imagination, the unknown woman. He decided to create a kind of monument dedicated to her, or, rather, to compensate for his youthful whim of appropriating her bones.
He made a bronze cast of the bones and mounted them onto white/gray marble. On the day of the opening, which happened in Oronsko, once more Dluzniewski visited Kozienice; he buried the bones in the place where he found them.
Obviously, one may wonder if the stone construction of the sculpture could be replaced by glass narrow cylinder. But, at any rate, it is one of the most intriguing artworks that I have seen recently. It is also important in another way. Art (and its human) is always in the state of being captured by Great Narrations–metaphysics, ideologies, theories, globalization, etc.–which appeal to the canon of "invariable truths," "most important themes," "inevitable directions of progression.". And which instruct us, critique us, provoke us–in one word–unify us according to definite examples and similarities. Happily, there are still artists who oppose the Great Narrations by seducing us with their dreams and stories. It seems that Dluzniewski, who for many years was "representative of Great Narrations," became recently the "creator of small narrations" (Lyotard). Small, but how splendid!
