art always has its consequences 2010

8/19/2019 Art Always Has Its Consequences 2010

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1intro

Art Always Has Its Consequences

★ ★ ★ | -


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3intro2 2008-2010

Art Always Has Its Consequences

:

What, How & for Whom / WHW

Slovenska / • - Zagreb

[email protected]

: What, How & for Whom/WHW [Ivet

Ćurlin • Ana Dević • Nataša Ilić • Sabina Sabolović]

★ Dóra Hegyi & Zsuzsa László [tranzit. hu] ★

Magdalena Ziółkowska & Katarzyna Słoboda

[Muzeum Sztuki] ★ new media center_kuda.org

: Michelle Y. Hyun

: John Bátki ★ Ágnes Csonka ★Keith

Donovan ★ Adele Eisenstein ★ Miklós Erhardt

★ Andreas Fogarasi ★ Ágnes Gagyi ★ KrzysztofKościuczuk ★ Nebojša Pajić ★ Zsófia Rudnay ★

Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák ★ Višnja Šijačić ★

Natalija Tripalo ★ Jim Tucker ★ Goran Vujasinović

: Jane Warrilow

: Sándor Bartha ★ Vladimir

Jerić ★ Szilárd Kovács ★ Dejan Kršić ★ Ivan Kuharić ★

Orfeas Skutelis ★ Marcin Stępień ★ Hajnalka Tulisz

: Dejan Kršić @WHW

: Muken Print Cream 80 g

: BrioniText & Typonine Sans [ Đ]★ Shire types

: Tiskara Zelina d.d.

:

July , Zagreb

: 9789535595113

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the

National and University Library in Zagreb under 741385.

: 180 kn ★ 25 € ★ 33 $

The exhibition Ar Always Has Is Consequences was

realised in collaboration with Subversive Film Festival.

www.subversivefilmfestival.com

:

Erste Foundation

European Commission

European Cultural Foundation

National Cultural Fund of Hungary

Ministry of Culture of the Republic of CroatiaNational Foundation for the Development of Civil Society

Office of Culture, Education and Sport of the City of Z agreb

ERSTE Foundation is a main partner of tranzit. hu

This publication has been funded with the support from

the European Commission. This publication is part of the

project Ar Always Has Is Consequences supported by

the culture - programe of the European Union.

This publication [communication] reflects only the views of the

authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any

use which may be made of the information contained therein.

All images are courtesy of the artists,

unless otherwise noted.

The organisers of the project Ar Always Has Is

Consequences would like to thank the participating

artists, contributors and collaborators.

www.artalways.org


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4 Art Always Has Its Consequences 5intro

Art Always Has Its Conseque nces was a two-year

collaborative platform (2008-2010) organised by

new media center_kuda.org (Novi Sad), tranzit. hu

(Budapest), Muzeum Sztuki (Łódź) and What, How

& for Whom/ WHW (Zagreb).

The project explored practices through which art

reaches its audience and their significance for broader

relations between art and society, focusing on four

thematic strands: the history of exhibitions, artists’

texts, conceptual design, typography, and institutional

archives.

The title, taken from a text by artist Mladen Stilinović

entitled Footwriting (1984), suggests investigation in

terms of the consequences for art in relation to reality,

but also in terms of intrinsic artistic procedures by

which art always ‘limits’ itself to being art.

FOOTWRITING

The subject of my work is the language of politics, i.e., its reflections on everyday life. I should like to paint.I paint, but the painting betrays me. I write, but the written word betrays me. The pictures and the words become not-my-pictures, not-my-words and this is what I want to achieve with this work – not-my-painting.If the language (the colour, the image, etc.) is the property of ideology, I too want to become the owner of sucha language. I want to think it with consequences. This is neither criticism nor ambiguity. What is imposedon me is imposed as a question, as an experience, as a consequence. If colours, words and materials haveseveral meanings, what is the one that is most imposed, what does it mean and does it mean anything – or isit just a dry run, a delusion? The question is how to manipulate that which manipulates you, so obviously, soshamelessly, but I am not innocent – there is no art without consequences.

, ,


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6 Art Always Has Its Consequences 7partner organisations

_. ★ www.kuda.org

New Media Center_kuda.org, founded in 2001, is anindependent cultural organisation based in Novi Sad,Serbia. It brings together artists, theoreticians, mediaactivists, researchers and the wider public to research intonew cultural relations, contemporary artistic practice,new technologies and social issues. Together with severalother independent organisations, kuda.org establishedthe youth cultural centre CK in 2007 in Novi Sad. Italso participates in the activities of the city network ofindependent cultural organisations For Cultural Policies –

Politics of Culture.As well as organising lectures, conferences and workshops,kuda.org (co-)curates exhibitions, and edits the publishingproject kuda.read , thereby collaborating with manyinternational cultural organisations and publishinghouses. An important part of kuda.org ’s work is theanalysis of the social, cultural and intellectual heritageof the former Yugoslavia, Vojvodina and Novi Sad, whichis realised through cooperation with different regionalcollectives.

, ★

What, How & for Whom/WHW is a curatorial collectiveformed in 1999 and based in Zagreb, Croatia. Its membersare Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić and SabinaSabolović, and designer and publicist Dejan Kršić. WHWorganises a range of production, exhibition and publishingprojects and has been running Gallery Nova in Zagrebsince 2003. What, how and for whom, the three basicquestions of every economic organisation, concerns theplanning, concept and realisation of exhibitions as wellas the production and distribution of artworks and the

artist’s position in the labour market. These questionsformed the title of WHW’s first project dedicated to the150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, held in 2000in Zagreb, and became the motto of WHW’s work, and thetitle of the collective. In 2009 WHW curated theth Istanbul Biennial entitled What Keeps Mankind

Alive?

. ★ htp://hu.ranzi.org/

Hungarian organisation tranzit. hu is an independentassociation initiating projects in different formatsand fields such as education, research, publishing andexhibitions. As both theory and practice are differentaspects of a specific way of thinking – artistic thinking –tranzit.hu represents the idea that art produces an excessof knowledge, which can be recycled and used in broadersocial discourse. This belief defines the organisation’sactivities. The association tranzit. hu belongs to a networkof tranzit offices active in Austria, the Czech Republic,

Hungary and Slovakia since 2002.Dóra Hegyi is a member of the tranzit.org curatorial teamfor Manifesta 8.

★ htp://www.msl.org.pl

Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź has one of the most remarkablecollections of twentieth and twenty-first centuryart in Europe. At the heart of this is the ‘a.r.’group’s International Collection of Modern Art , from 1931, created by Jan Brzękowski, Władysław Strzemiński, KatarzynaKobro, Julian Przyboś and Henryk Stażewski. This isinternationally significant since it was initiated by theartists themselves, and results from a joint effort to act

beyond and against artis tic and other boundaries. TheMuzeum’s collection includes works by major avant-

garde and neo- avant-garde artists such as: Theo vanDoesburg, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Hans Arp andKurt Schwitters. Since 1945, some of the most importantelements of the collection have been: the creation of the

‘neoplastic room’ by Strzemiński; major gifts of avant-garde works in the 1950s and British art in the 1970s;Polentransport 1981 by Joseph Beuys; the collection ofworks by artists connected to Construction in Process (1981)and a collection of American art donated in 1983 by theartists involved in the fiftieth anniversary project Echangeentre artistes 1931-1982. In 2008 Muzeum Sztuki opened anew space – ms2 – located in the grounds of Manufaktura where the collection is now displayed.


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8 Art Always Has Its Consequences 9TABLE OF CONTENTS

05 Inroducion 06 Parners ino

SECTOR 1 TIMELINE Chronology of events organised by partner organisations 13

SECTOR 2 ESSAYS & INTERVIEWS

G. M. Tamás★ Communism on he Ruins of Socialism 74

kuda.org inerview wih Hito Steyerl ★ How Abou Thinking Abou he Fuure Raher Than he Pas? 83

Ovidiu Tichindeleanu ★ Where Are We, When We Think In Easern Europe? 85

Renata Salecl ★ Pos-Socialis Anxiey and Hypercapialism 93

Boris Buden★

Geting Ou of Here101

Ozren Pupovac ★ Presen Perfec, or he Time of Pos-Socialism 107

Maciej Gdula ★ Two Criical Ars 113

Gal Kirn ★ Ani-fascis Memorial Sies: Pure Ar or he Myhologisaion of Socialis Yugoslavia? 120

Hedwig Saxenhuber ★ Greeings from he Ne herworld, A Phoograph from Yerevan, 135

Elena Filipovic ★ The Condiional Perfec Museum 141

SECTOR 3 ART always has its consequences - exhibition artIST DESCRIPTIONS & DOCUMENTS

What, How & for Whom/ WHW★ Ar Always Has Is Consequences 151

158 Creativity Exercises (Miklós Erdély and Dóra Maurer) Miklós Erdély, Creaiviy and Fanasy Developing Exercises (excerpt) Creaiviy Exercises, transcript

162 Goran Đorđević

164 Miklós Erdély Solidariy Acion

168 Andreas Fogarasi

170 Guerilla Art Action Group

176 Tibor Hajas Sel-Fashion Show – transcript

178 Sanja Iveković

180 Andreja Kulunčić

182 David Maljković

186 Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos manieso o manieso

manieso on geniusmanieso on aesheic

192 Vlado Martek

194 Piet Mondrian Mondrian -, a lecture by Waler Benjamin Franz Kafa: The Painer

203 Ciprian Mureşan

206 Deimantas Narkevičius

208 Novi Kolektivizam

210

Andrzej Partum Animal Manieso

214 Gyula Pauer

216 Tamás St.Auby Cenaur film script (excerpt)

FIKA interview with Tamás St. Auby (excerpt)

220 Tomo Savić - Gecan

222 Sean Snyder

223 Mladen Stilinović

226 Bálint Szombathy

228 Milan Trenc

230 Ultra-redBordering on he Fuure: Ar, Acivism and Analysis

236 As soon as I open my eyes, I see a film (cinema clubs & the Genre Film Festival/GEFF ) Ani-film – Wha is i?,GEFF

GEFF, GEFF

246 Didactic Exhibition: Abstract Art

248 Ideology o Design: Fragments on the History o Yugoslav Design Radoslav Puar, Inroducion o Konak e xhibiion

252 Symposium Wroclaw ’ Anasazy Wiśniewski , Ar Cenre (The Pillory ) Marian Bogusz group , Celina Housing Esae Oskar Hansen , Work Tile: The Worldseer Włodzimierz Borowski , Work Tile: The Dialogue


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10 Art Always Has Its Consequences 112008-2010

NEP, Empy

Spaces, fake

polaroids of the

former building

of the Museum

of Contemporary

Art, Zagreb,


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1 TIMELINE :ID: Ideology of Design ,Museum of ContemporaryArt of Vojvodina,Novi Sad,

KUDA.ORG MUZEUM SZTUKI TRANZIT. HU WHW


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14 sector 1 15timeline

“In the season that is now behind us, there were eight

exhibition openings at our Gallery, and they were allquite different. On the occasion of this ninth opening,

we have come together in order to mark its end, undisturbed by art and its confusing forms.

Our openings are usually attended by cultural and man-ual workers, painters, sculptors, models, graphic artists, arthistorians and history historians, television people, writ-ers (rarely), actors from the theatre across the street, balletdancers male and female, photographers and photographs,philosophers of Marxist orientation and Marxists of no ori-entation, cyberneticists and fans, managers and secretaries,unemployed architects and jobless urban planners and, ofcourse, many foreign guests. We are also sometimes visited

by art critics. Others jus t write intuitively.We have tried to reach as many people as possible with our

invitation – as your visit is your own success.Today, we are opening an exhibition about the intimate

encounter between our exhibits.Each gallery and each cultural institution generally seeks

to increase belief in the poetic significance of human work.Knowing that you all comprise that work in some way, wehave gathered you here to give you an opportunity to con-vince each other, once again, of your significance.

Since we are certain of it, we have decided that we shouldallow you to experience pure presence in this moment, pres-ence without obligation: you should just be that silent pas-sion that commonly drives you to have your conversationsand to gossip, to have your lunches, naps, work, and dreams.You should just live here intimately with your ideas, even ifyou don’t have any. Feel what you wish, according to yourown sense of social order.

And we received what we asked for.So today we are opening an exhibition that has no exhib-

its – it is us who are here to exhibit ourselves.So just be men and be women. Exchange opinions and

sexes. Some among you have already done this.Forget that you were once officials, forget that you were

artists, forget that you were scientists, forget that you weremarried, abroad, in church, on a ship, on an island, and es-pecially in a meadow, forget that you were treading uponthe grass that someone else had been eating, forget that youwere eating each other, forget your d aily stew, forget all thestrange faces and be welcomed by Snow White, SleepingBeauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, for youare the most beautiful fable in the world: it is said that youexisted and that you will exist, but only children believe it before going to sleep, before they start dreaming.

We are sure that this exhibition, our ninth exhibition, willmake you believe in art once again.

Hegelian scepticism and all that talk about the end of art– it will be defeated here, hic et nunc.

And the victims will be equal to the victors.Look at yourself as you would do from the street, and then

forget where it is taking you.Look at yourself as you do in the mirror, and never forget

whose face it is.Look at the people you know, as you would look at yourself,

and love will once again conquer the world. F rom this exhibi-tion, from this hall, from this Gallery, from this Centre, theWorld itself should emerge, rejuvenated in the face of art.

That is our modest wish.” — , № ,

15.09.2008★Gallery Nova, Zagreb

Exhibition of Women & Men What, How & for Whom/WHW & Želimir Koščević

The Exhibiion o Women and Men was held in , in theinfluential Gallery o he Suden Cenre in Zagreb, whichwas one of the main protagonists in the development

of conceptual art and of the dematerialisation of the

artwork in Croatia. The recreation of the project was

done as a collaboration between the former SC gallerycurator Želimir Koščević and WHW. The same invitationfor the audience to be the exhibition was sent out.

Be an exhibition, for god’s sake.At this exhibition, it is you who is art and figuration, you

are the social realism.Beware, your eyes are resting upon you.You are the body in space, the moving body, you are the

kinetic sculpture and spatio-dynamism.Art is not outside of you. Either there is no art, or that

art is you.Hypocrites, prowlers, bogiemen, false prophets, perverts,

and missionaries of various kinds probably expected thatthey would see all sorts of things at our ninth exhibition,even the naked flesh of both sexes. Forget it!

Chastity is a virtue that we have not forgotten.In this time of collective indulgence in nudity, be it play-

boyish, hustlerish, penthouseish, escortish, privateish, bare-ly-legalish, or any other type of nudity that we have importedfrom rotten capitalism, our lust keeps increasing, while our

birth rate keeps decreasing.So, this is our ninth exhibition and we are closing the sea-

son with it.Yet we may indeed say that we are not only coming to the

end of the season in our gallery work, but also the workingseason of an entire sector of cultural activities at the Stu-dent Centre of Zagreb University. As in previous years, ourwork here has been received with enthusiasm. We haven’tnoticed anyone who viewed our shows with scepticism andwe were always received with applause and respect, whilethose who were our superiors at work showed lots of friendlyunderstanding.

We have always believed that a friendly atmosphere andfull cooperation are absolutely necessary in this ty pe of work.

Opening of the Exhibiion o Women &

Men, Gallery Nova, Zagreb,

: The Exhibiion o Women & Men,

Gallery of the Student Centre, Zagreb,


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18.0912.10.2008★Gallery Nova, Zagreb

The Case of the SKC in the 1970s Prelom kolektiv Belgrade


The Case of the SKC in the 1970s Dušan Grlja & Jelena Vesić Belgrade

The Case of the SKC in the 1970s is an exhibition of researchmaterials: documents, images, texts, films, testimonies,researchers’ notes. This exhibition, in the form of ‘a note-

The ‘case’ of the Students’ CulturalCentre (SKC) in Belgrade reveals impor-

tant characteristics of a general constel-lation of art and politics in the SocialistFederal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Itis a characteristic of strategies after 1968to contain, pacify and institutionalisestudent or youth culture as an ‘organisedalternative’. Like many other students’cultural centres throughout the SFRY,the SKC was an official state-constitut-ed cultural institution offering youngartists and cultural workers ‘a roof overtheir heads’. At the same time, it was aplace of avant-garde experimentation

– for the introduction of new technolo-

gies, new expressions, new forms of political activismand self-organisation.

In the present cultural-political situation, the SKC is being both fetishised and marginalised. On theone hand, it is seen as a space of unlimited freedomand individual creative expression in the midst ofan oppressive, totalitarian state. This romantic andnostalgic view is usually followed by reactionary fas-cination with the formalist return of language andsymbolism of the (neo-)avant-garde, characteristicof our post-socialist condition. On the other hand,within the new conservative trend of re-constituting

book in the space’, offers an insight intothe present stage of one part of the on-going collective research project – Po-

litical Practices of (Post-)Yugoslav Art , initiated by WHW (Zagreb), kuda.org (Novi Sad), SCCA/pro.ba (Sarajevo) andPrelom kolektiv (Belgrade), in 2006.The project traces, problematises andarticulates the interrelationships ofvisual art, intellectual production andsocio-political practices in the formerYugoslav context. It tries to give back toart the political voice that has b een tak-en from it, both actively (through thedomination of the ‘cultural industries’approach) and retroactively (throughthe way it is historicised).

: The Case o he SKC in he s, : ć : The Case o he SKC in he s, : ć

national cultures, its historical contributions remain excluded from the con-temporary system of evaluation. The

symptomatic exclusion of the experi-ence of the SKC’s artist, activist and or-ganisational practices shows the eras-ure of strategies for contemporary re-gional cultural institutions that remainpotentially viable. The research for TheCase of the Students’ Cultural Centre inthe 1970s aims to extricate the concreterelationships and transactions betweenartists and the institution, in order toreveal the political genealogy of con-temporary art practices.

Our aim, therefore, is not to ‘discov-er’ and historicise what are nowadaysseen as the underground art practicesof some ‘brave’ individuals in the faceof a totalitarian system. Rather, it is acall for the re-examination, from thecontemporary perspective, of artisticand cultural production within theneo-liberal constellation of t he post-Yu-goslav situation, which could point tothe possibilities of reviving progressiveand critical experiences, which existedin the cultural, artistic and intellectu-al scene in the former Yugoslavia, andwhich are still relevant for artistic andcultural production within the neo-lib-eral constellation of the post-Yugoslavsituation.


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Deimantas Narkevičius, The Head,

The three-day opening of ms², the newvenue of Muzeum Szuki in Łódź, lo-cated in the post-industrial complex of

Manuakura, featured the launch of theinternational project Ar Always Has IsConsequences, accompanied by a film pro-gramme, The Builders – Avan-Garde Uo-pia in he Language o Film , and a lectureby the Hungarian scholar Edi András, TheFuure Is Behind Us.

The avant-garde artists of the s

and s saw the contemporary world

as a challenge. The trajectory of artistic

aspirations of the time is well illustrated

by the call for the construction of a new

reality, found in the projects of El Lis-sizky, Rodchenko and Sepanova thatcombined laboratory experiments with

propaganda works. The process of build-

ing a new world, a rapid artistic and uto-

pian effort, was an act of great courage

on the part of the artists. The opportu-

nity to shape the new reality went be-

yond the sphere of analysing the form of

a work of art and placing it in the social

space. The ‘new reality‘ required different

organisational principles and a new ideol-

ogy, in this case identified by the context

of Salin‘s policies. The artist became theBuilder of the Great Utopia both literally

and metaphorically.

Almost eighty years later, connections

between the avant-garde and the ideo-

logical construction of utopia and social-

ism have resurfaced, albeit indirectly. Con-

temporary artists have either retrieved

them from the fissures of memory, or

discovered them anew among the ruins

of the socialist edifice. Films by AndreasFogarasi, Deimanas Narkevičius andDavid Maljković are shot amidst the rel-ics of the former era – Budapest’s cultur-

al centres, a power station in the Latvian

city of Elektrėnai, the monumental head

of Karl Marx, and the monument of VojinBakić in Petrova Gora. Rather than nostal-

22.11.2008★ms², Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź

The Builders AvantGarde Utopia in the L anguage of Film Magadalena Ziółkowska

The aim of the collective research andediting process of artists’ writings,manifestos and documents from post-socialist countries is to create a basis

for comparative studies of artists’ ideas

and artistic movements from Central

and Eastern Europe, which for fiy

years shared a common history of state

socialism. The collection of artists’ texts

is not only an important source material

for further research into the art and

cultural history of a country or region,

it also represents reflections on social

and political changes and new strategies

by which art has reacted to them.

02.12.2008 ★Gallery Nova, Zagreb

From the museum tothe gallery and not theother way around Magdalena Ziółkowska

0405.12.2008★Labor, Budapest

Artists’ texts 1 editorialmeeting with representativesof all the coediting partners. Kristine Stiles abouher experience o ediinghe book Theories and Documens ofConemporary Ar eds. Kristine Stiles & Peter Selz ,Universiy o Caliornia Press, )

gic gestures that summon up places and

artworks once thrown into oblivion, the

artists see them as an aempt at under-

standing and confronting the motives be-

hind the construction of socialism.

Two videos are dedicated to the idea of

designing an urban utopia. Dream o War-saw by Arur Żmijewski, a film-conver-sation with the architect Oskar Hansen (–), focuses on the dialogue be-

tween the architect and the space sur-

rounding Warsaw’s Palace of Culture,

ironically called a ‘gi’ from the Eastern

Neighbour.Teheran by Solmaz Shah-bazi & Tirdad Zolghadr, on the other hand,

is a story about the post-war reconstruc-tion of a divided city, in which the flow of

history is accelerated.

How do the ‘relics’ of the past find them-

selves in the contemporary context? And,

conversely, how do we find them there?

In Anri Sala’s Inervisa, we witness a lan-guage that fails to name and therefore

create a world. Phrases that meant a lot

in former regimes ring hollow, resembling

linguistic mistakes. The artists from the

group Cho Dela? revisit fundamentalquestions by standing on a wall, posing

as workers from the painting by VikorPopkov The Builders o Brask , and say-ing: “The feeling that we are building

something is very important for us. That

is why we tried to discover what we were

actually building.”

The films were accompanied by a

lecture delivered by the Hungarian art

critic and art historian, Professor EdiAndrás, who deals with the issues ofpolitical transformation in post-socialist

countries. In her presentation The FuureIs Behind Us András spoke about relationsbetween revolutionary utopias from the

beginning of the century, their abuses in

communist times and the attitudes of

contemporary artists.

Artur Żmijewski, Dream o Warsaw, ,

First editorial

meeting with

representatives

of all partners

Cover for the

section devoted

to the Mona

Lisa Gallery

in monthly

magazine Odrapublished in

Wrocław,


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“Ithink that in each one of my books there issome reason why it is a book, that the ele-ment that interests me in it is repeated orplaced in such a context that without being readin book form it would not have the same effect. Idon’t do sketches. My sketches exist only in writ-ten form, I jot down the ideas. When I started to do

books, I was spending a lot of time with literatureand experimental film. Various kinds of drama-turgy or anti-dramaturgy interested me. Thereare various ways in which the structure is built;sometimes on the first page everything is alreadysaid. Sometimes there is a page-by-page develop-ment of the idea, or sometimes there’s a catch thatcomes only at the end.

Today I’m interested, glad even, that I struc-tured some things in a manner th at I can no longerdiscern. My thinking is developing along some oth-er lines today. I know that there is some story inthe background. Perhaps someone will be able toreconstruct it. For example, in the book My SweetLittle Lamb there are quotes from Wittgenstein’sTractatus. But they are not in the right order, fol-lowing some order of mine instead. Why I ch angedtheir order, I just don’t know any longer.”

“I’m interested in the city milieu, the streets,the everyday life of the newspapers. Apartfrom culture, i.e., art, they are my main in-terest. Rawness comes from me personally andfrom the street. When I was a kid I would go bymyself to the market place, walk around, watch…I was always interested in the way people werewriting, how they were expressing themselves inthe displays, writing up the prices in the market,at various events, flea markets. The manner theyuse to express themselves is actually signwriting.This is a concept that is particularly connectedwith the street. It’s close to me, and I always work by hand.”

“The newspaper inspiration partly stemmedfrom the fact that papers are collages. Ifyou don’t look at just the one text, butimmediately link it up with the article next toit or something from the previous page then you

05.12.200831.01.2009★Gallery Nova, Zagreb

Invisible History of Exhibitions, 1 round

Mladen Stilinović,I Wanna Go Home Artist’s Books -

M laden Silinović has been producing artist’s bookssince the early s. The exhibition at Gallery Nova was the artist’s first comprehensive public presentation

of this work in Croatia. By engaging with materials suchas cardboard, newspapers, fabrics, and everyday objects,

Silinović has developed a strategy of ‘poor’ artistic procedureand a sort of autonomy or independence from the system,

not only in terms of art production, but also regarding the

framework of presentation. He has consistently adhered to

that strategy by producing books in small editions. So far,

he has presented his books in solo and group exhibitions, in

galleries and various other spaces, and with the Group o SixAuhors in the framework of their exhibitions/actions.

Mladen Stilinović

Mladen Stilinović, Save,

: Mladen Stilinović,

I Wanna Go Home - Aris’s Books


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12.12.2008 ★Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź

Dust, Ash and Greyness.The Remnants of the Archive Andrzej Leśniak

Dust, greyness and ashes are the figures thatdominate thinking about archives. They forma set of categories that make the work of the

archive possible in relation to material and mental

objects. An archive remains just a collection of

remnants, relics and scraps that are beyond the

reach of analysis unless it calls for psychoanalytical

and post-psychoanalytical methods.

December 2008Invisible History of Exhibitions,Gallery Nova Newspapers № 18 WHW

In the first special editionfor the Invisible Hisoryo Exhibiions, Gallery NovaNewspapers exploredexhibitions as specific

sites, where art is critically

presented, and knowledge is

produced and disseminated.

It included materials closely

linked to the programmes

realised in the Gallery Nova in Zagreb from September

to December , such as

the Exhibiion o Women andMen, The Case o SKC in hes, and the exhibition ofbooks by Mladen Silinović,The historical examples

shown at Nova were

contextualised through

a number of essays and interviews, including

interviews with Ivan Picelj and ŽelimirKoščević, and were linked to contemporary artpractices through a series of new contributions

commissioned by Kuda.org from Novi Sad.

moment I am interested in differentproblems requiring different methodsand tools. In my opinion, the longeryou are using documents and archivalmaterial, the easier it becomes tonotice that it is getting harder andharder to deal with them seriously,or in a traditional way. This has todo with an increasing interest in

‘documentary style’, both in filmand art in general. The technicalmeans available today, i.e., software,etc., make this style of work easy

19.12.2008 ★ms², Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź

Screening of films by the German artist Lutz Dammbeckwith an introduction by Krzysztof Pijarski

★Hommage à la Sarraz 1981★Herakles Höhle 1989/1990★ Zei der Göter 1993★Mediencollage Herakles 19831986

Lutz Dammbeck,

La Sarraz,

“We are using the pastto shed light on thepresent, first of all for

ourselves, at least it was that way inthe East or in totalitarian structureswhere there was a need for a secretlanguage, for the coding of messages

– we also moved under cover of thatpast, we were staging the past as away to talk about the present. I calledthat slave language (Sklavensprache).This is only one aspect, relevant to aspecific historical situation. At the

to produce, and the philosophicalmodels that send reality into the

realm of fiction and construction onlyspeed up this process.Of course, this ‘borderlessness’

assigns totally new meanings to‘document’ and ‘archive’, underminingtheir hitherto prevailing definitions.If everything is fiction, then why notproduce and use invented archivesand fictional documents? This is adangerous phenomenon – think ofthe extremely rare photographs ofprisoners in Auschwitz. They can also

be ‘recreated’ or ‘simulated’ withoutdifficulty.

And then what happens when it’sno longer possible to tell counterfeitfrom copy, and documents andarchives can be easily forged?Who should stand up against thisand for what reason? The ‘opennotion of art’ has only acceleratedthis process; montage, collage,defamiliarisation/dematerialisation,i.e., fictionalisation. In fact these aremodern stylistic means. At the sametime, doubts about the ‘truth of thearchive’ are absolutely allowed andlegitimate.”

—

,

:

get a very different story. I was interested in thisnewspaper dramaturgy, which was not done de-liberately, for if this were a conscious process, itwould all look different. In socialism they us ed tosay that the graphics industry people deliberatelycommitted howlers. It would be enough to changeone letter and from ‘savez komunista’ you get ‘savezkomuništa’, thus ‘league of socialists’ turns into

‘nothing is in common’. That would be interest-ing to read. I was also interested in political cli-chés and the way in which a personal language waschanged because of politics, how normal wordsare turned into a political phrase through a par-ticular arrangement. That was an awf ul process tome. I am not thinking here just of the phrases that

are worn out by repetition, like socialism or self-management, but of some ordinary words that areconstantly repeated and you can’t ignore the con-text from which they stem. So, for example, innormal speech you would never use the phrase ‘utom smislu’ – ‘in this sense’, because you would lookan idiot, everyone would think of a party meeting.In studying the newspapers, language as repres-sion interested me. If you want to communicate,you have to keep a constant lookout, or room formisunderstandings opens up.”

“When I say that art is nothing – I amthinking of the social role of art.Here art means nothing, and notonly today. But this nothing is importa nt becauseit is a form of freedom that is outside the main sys-tem of society. Actually, inside this system, whichdoes not allow voids, this nothing is very impor-tant. Everything has some purpose, but art doesnot. Except for me as an artist. I find this hard toexplain. You do some critical art that is a part ofsociety, but you are aware that it has no conse-quences at all. And this is an absurdity, but I loveit, this absurdity, I love this nothing. This is whatprovokes me to work.”

—

, ć –

, –

, , ,

“


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By researching archival materials, theexhibition presented some of the crucial,yet insufficiently researched examples ofsocially engaged artistic production in Eastern

Europe. It featured some of the paradigmatic

historical examples of conceptual art from this

area: IDEA ART [, project initiator: JerzyLudwiński, Wrocław],Imaginaion/Idea [,project initiator: László Beke, Budapest]andMAJ 75 [-, project initiators: Group o SixAuhors, Zagreb]. These were the most radicalconceptual examples of collaborative platforms

that occurred outside of the institutional

framework and included a large number of

participants, thus initiating innovative and

autonomous ways of producing and circulating art.

IDEA ART (, project initiator: JerzyLudwiński, Wrocław) including works by AndrzejLachowicz★Zdzisław Jurkiewicz★ZbigniewDłubak★Naalia Lach-Lachowicz★ JerzyRosołowicz★Zbigniew Makarewicz★SanisławDróżdż★Anasazy Wiśniewski★AnoniDzieduszycki★Barbara Kozłowska★ JanChwałczyk★Maria Michałowska★ JerzyFedorowicz and Ludmiła Popiel

Imaginaion/Idea (, project initiator:László Beke, Budapest) including worksby Gábor Atalai★Imre Bak★ JenőBalaskó★András★Baranyay AtilaCsáji★Tibor Csiky★Péer Donáh★ MiklósErdély★ János Fajó★Ferenc Ficzek★ Gadányi György★Gyula Gulyás★Isván

Haraszy★Tamás Hencze★György Jovánovics★György Kemény★IlonaKeserü★Károly Kismányoki★LászlóLakner★Ferenc Lanos★ János Major★LászlóMéhes★Isván Nádler★Gyula Pauer★GézaPerneczky★Sándor Pinczehelyi★TamásSzenjóby★Kálmán Szíjáró★DezsőTandori★Endre Tó and Péer Türk

MAJ 75 (–, project initiators: Groupo Six Auhors, Zagreb) – Boris Demur, Željko Jerman, Vlado Marek, Mladen Silnović, SvenSilinović, and Fedor Vučemilović

“Impossible art is not a tendency, but rather a new artisticsphere, comprising equallythe elements of both tendenciesoutlined earlier. It is not, however,a simple synthesis or the allyingof former trends, but rather theirfurther dispersion. Impossible art

brought about such a revaluationof artistic phenomena that it has

become necessary to redefine artitself. A new definition would haveto take into consideration all thenew elements of art, which have not

been considered before. It should be

more capacious than all the previousdefinitions. Consequently, impossibleart in all its variations would becomea notion much broader than all theformer definitions of art. In the lasttwo years various attempts have beenmade to define and classify impossibleart. These attempts have not yet beenentirely successful, though somestatements produced by both artistsand art theorists from those circlesdeserve closer consideration. DouglasHuebler, an American artist, thusreferred to his own practice: ‘Art is notSOMETHING, art is EVERYTHING’,with the exception of all the thingsthat resemble art.”

“Though the number of artists isincreasing, it is obvious that the agein which we live is not the age of

art. There are areas in which progress is muchfaster and these set the tone of contemporarycivilization. I mean here science and technology.The two major functions of art – cognitive andcreative – have been considerably challenged:the former by science, and the latter bytechnology. It might seem that artists have beenpushed away from previously occupied positionsor that they are being moved to a marginalposition.

This results in a paradoxical situation. Themore the territory of art is shrinking, the moreart is encroaching upon the territories of theapparently victorious disciplines. And sincethese are most symptomatic of contemporaryreality, art cannot avoid confronting them, and

it has to enter into a dialogue with science andtechnology. This dialogue, like all dialogues between art and reality, is complex, and itembraces a broad range of attitudes, fromacceptance to rejection. As regards visualexperiments, art enters so much into theterritory of science and technology, that they become indistinguishable; the products of newrealism and dada cannot be distinguished fromcommonplace objects and natural things, andhappenings and other artistic actions fromeveryday activities.”

“At this moment weneed the notion ofa process, which

cannot be reconstructed,and for which I wouldsuggest the name of ‘absentart’, to become aware of acertain critical situation,comparable to the notionof limes in mathematics.When these processes have been deciphered and absentart becomes part of an artsystem, then we couldcertainly equate art andreality.

Perhaps, even today, we donot deal with art. We mighthave overlooked the moment

when it transformeditself into somethingelse, something whichwe cannot yet name. It iscertain, however, that whatwe deal with offers greaterpossibilities.”

—

,

, ..

ę, . .,

, , .

09.0108.02.2009★Gallery Nova, Zagreb

Invisible History of Exhibitions /Second Publicity, 2 round Dóra Hegyi & Zsuzsa Lászlóranzi. hu, Budapes★Magdalena ZiółkowskaMuzeum Szuki, Łódź & WHW Zagreb

: Imaginaion/Idea,

: ć

Fragments from the

publication Noes rom

he Fuure o Ar. Seleced

Wriings by Jerzy Ludwiński

(Eindhoven–Roerdam:

Van Abbemuseum /

Veenman Publishers, )

: Idea Ar

question of romanticisms Romanticisms tend to 06 02 2009★ Gallery Nova Zagreb


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“Dear Friend,Budapest, 4. August 1971.

I ask you here to take part in an experimental,educational, and documentation project titled

IDEA

which I have initiated and which has the following aims:1/ to give an overview on the current state of a few

tendencies in contemporary Hungarian art;2/ to find a solution for the well-known difficulties of

exhibiting, publishing etc.The point of the project: the creation of an ‘exhibition’that is only realised in thought, the material of which,however, is accurately documented. It is possible toparticipate with any kind of and any number of artisticcomments /objects, processes, situations, etc./ the onlycondition is that the work should be described in such away that we can understand its idea. For this reason it isstrongly advised to send – in addition to the description

– the most complete documentation possible /sketches,photos, etc./. Consequently:

the WORK = the DOCUMENTATION OF THE IDEA

The materials submitted will probably be placed in astandard size folder – in alphabetical order according tothe names of the artists – and will be accessible to anyonewho is interested. I have sent invitations to the followingartists:

attalai, bak, balaskó, baranyay, csáji, csiky, donáth,erdély, fajó, ficzek, gulyás, haraszty, hencze, jovánovics, kemény, keserü, kismányoki, lakner, lantos, major

j., méhes, perneczky, pinczehelyi, szentjóby, szíjártó,tandori, tót, türk.If you agree with my proposal send your material to thefollowing address before the 31st of September, 1971. /Bp.IX. Thaly Kálmán u. 56.I/3a/

Kind regards,László Beke”

— ,

,

“Rhetorically or not, I alwaysask the following question:What is the use of liars in art[or ultra-aestheticians, as we art crit-ics tend to say]? What followed most ofthe New Practice people like a shadowwas the aura of ethics. That was also thecase with the issues of MAJ through-out the years of its publication. The wayof participating, both spiritually and

technically, the methods of distribu-tion and feedback – all that was special, based on individual responsibility, andintended for both expected and unex-pected readership.

The format of MAJ speaks of thespirit of the time and its convictions.The A format persisted, both as paperand as a format, a recognisable featureof art in the 1970s: conceptualism andpost-conceptualism. To be sure, theGroup of Six Authors, which was pub-lishing the magazine, made the issuesadditionally recognisable – by usingsellotape and Xeroxing, for example.Whoever glances through any of theissues of MAJ is bound to find a briefintroduction that is important for thephysiognomy of collaboration and even

for the poetics of those years. Havingstarted with the six authors, the mag-azine spread its wings over the yearsand eventually included over fortyartists from various parts of the coun-try. There were 17+1 issues altogether,marked with 17 letters [A to LJ]. Thiswas linked to the idea of bringing outthe entire alphabet, which would rep-resent an adequate number and thus re-veal the conceptual obsession with lin-guistics. I will now briefly address the

question of romanticisms. Romanticisms tend toemerge from an idealist mind, and such a dose ofidealism was typical of the 1970s, since those art-ists were heirs of the enlightenment and surreal-ist utopia [of society]. Change tends to happen [ifit happens] in an individual who is thus imbibedwith romanticism. It is all about freedom, aboutsubjectivity that comes out of spontaneity, andabout loyalty to courage, which brings insightsinto the deep nature of man that are not alwayscomfortable. Despite this, one seeks to find analternative to the common, while petty success-es are sacrificed for the freshness of somethingnew, touchingly unexpected, and barely profit-able. With the practice of creating an outprint, the

horizontal value of today may become the verticalvalue of the future audience. To this, one can addthe principle ‘less is more’, thus coming to the con-ceptual gain of MAJ , and this is all paradigmaticfor the imperfect collapse of art into the cellar ofculture, that is happening today.

The magazine functioned as a mobile exhibi-tion of originals, ready-mades, and copies. Dis-or-der became a welcome order in the readers’ heads .The transparency of collaboration and assemblagecertainly helped preserve the great charm of thematerial. Once they were broadened, the horizonsof perception and reception were not susceptibleto secondary criticism [of form etc.]; instead, theywere set as a sort of limitation to freedom, free-dom that the Russian avant-garde had left us asa legacy: the visionary freedom. The concept isthus a divine thing, while conceptualism, whichwas the approximate context from which MAJ

emerged, is the afternoon of a utopian vision. Wemay easily say that without projects such as MAJ there would be a void, an uninspired void, andthat they give legitimacy to idealism; not an offi-cial legitimacy, but rather a spiritual one, despitethe numerous basic problems that were bringingthe project down.

Or else we may say: it was the dusty sectionsas opposed to [and combined with] the gloriousones.”

— . , – ,

№


Imagination/Idea László Beke Budapes

: MAJ 75,

: ć

Géza Perneczky, Uniled [yes & no,

dialecics, and möbius & möbius],

János Major, The Tomb o Lajos Kubisa,

, typewrien text and photo

Contributions to the Imaginaion/

Idea project,

26.0205.05.2009 ★Muzeum Sztuki Łódź


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26.02 05.05.2009 ★Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź

Working Title: Archive Magdalena Ziółkowska

Archiving is a work of memory that determines what isto be preserved in order to form a historical reserve forthe future. In today’s network culture, privileging access and

openness, we momentarily forget about how we are being

shaped by the past. There still exist places, however, where the

past is not only deposited, but its traces organised, indexed

and categorised according to strict systems of historical

classification. One such site is the museum archive, which

offers the means for reconsidering the relationship between

the past and the present, as well as its duty of public character,

not only in reference to what it holds, but also to everything

that has been overshadowed, excluded or deprived of access.For the first time in the history of Muzeum Szuki in Łódź,an institutional archive became the point of departure for an

exhibition. Reflecting on the functioning of the archive and

its accessibility is at the core of Marysia Lewandowska andLasse Schmid Hansen’s practice expressed in both directand metaphorical gestures. Both projects set out to question

the truth of the document while focusing on phenomena

emerging on the margins of an institution’s official activity.

In Tender Museum, Marysia Lewandowska combines the publicand private image of the Muzeum, preserved in conversations,films and sound recordings. By making the archive material

Marysia Lewandowska, Recovered Conversaion -,

“

[…] Lasse Schmidt Hansen’s works deconstruct normsand prescriptions and the way they determine percep-tion and behaviour. If it seems counter-intuitive to bring

up the notion of will in connection to the way his worksre-connect to a Conceptualist play with paradigms, it is anattempt to talk about an intuition for the paradoxical withwhich his works place themselves in the world with an inves-tigative scepticism to the way things are identified, orderedand categorised. The various kinds of sameness in his work(seriality and automatism in the work’s structure, anonym-ity and discreteness in its appearance), makes it safe to saythat this is art that refuses to be Things. However, every re-peated action in Schmidt Hansen’s work is informed by a de-sire to further explore the organisation of things, by drivingwedges in between the will that has organised them, and its

representation. His works can be like trapdoors that threatento swallow us up because the centre and the solid ground oflogic no longer hold – if it weren’t for the fact that at the same

time they pull us headlong into space because they open upinfinite lines of flight.

[…]Schmidt Hansen escapes the dichotomy of materialityversus non-materiality that is often constructed in Concep-tualist and post-Conceptualist practices and their reception.Only for a conventional and de- contextualised considerationwill a Conceptual work be something ‘less’; firstly seeing howthis idea in a self-contradictory way departs from objecthood,and secondly because objecthood in a spectacular culture isalready something infinitely relative.

Even as the spatial aspect of his works is pronounced it isof a different sort than, say, those of a Michael Asher, with

Lasse Schmidt Hansen, Uro, and Uniled Grey, , : . ńaccessible, the artist re-activates the act of giving

that lies at the heart of the Muzeum’s origin.The works of Lasse Schmid Hansen, whichfrequently use anonymous and mass-produced

objects, with meticulous aention drawn to

minute details of office and archive space, proveunseling. The artist’s practice, rooted in the drive

towards bureaucratisation and documenting,

serves as a characteristic feature of modernity.

The final section of Working Tile: Archive offers acritical reflection on the rhetoric of the exhibition

titled Consrucivism in Poland –, which,being among one of the best-known projects

in the history of the Muzeum, was presented inmore than sixteen institutions, inscribing Polish

constructivism into international art history.

Lasse Schmidt Hansen,


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whom Schmidt Hansen shares a rig-our and economy of mundane materi-als found in familiar and institutionalspaces; but he employs this familiarityto produce agitation rather than trans-parency. ‘Agitation’ would be the liter-al translation of the Danish title of his2006 work Uro , consisting of a numberof plastic strips from a blind of the sortwhere the strips move in coordina-

tion when pulled by a string. SchmidtHansen has taken the strips from theirframe and hung them vertically sothey hover just above the gallery floor,where they are invisibly suspended by strings and rotate asfree individuals. The art historically correct title of this ty peof work would have been ‘mobile’, in reference to a categoryof kinetic sculpture. That the artist has instead chosen tocall it ‘agitation’ denotes the undoing or re-organisation ofseveral categories into a new, kinaesthetic state that can beset in motion by the smallest gust of wind.

If Schmidt Hansen’s works delight in revealing absencesin the midst of spectacular culture, they are also often fullto the brim. Accumulation takes on special significance as acharacteristic of materiality versus identification. An accu-mulation describes an undifferentiated mass or quantum ofa single category that typically tends towards entropy andnon-meaning. The four colour photographs of Piled Up Stuff Photographed From the Front, Back, Right and Left But Not

Necessarily in That Order (2007) could be a depiction of veryimportant documents or completely redundant printed mat-ter. It is the belated and obviously failed attempt at a categori-cal approach to a bunch of ‘piled up stuff’ that has reducedaccumulated singularities to pure material, and hence has become a pure exterior.

As things pile up, they inv ariably fall outside of use, placeand order, or they even become threatening when they reachcritical mass. Piling up is meaningless: only for a religiousmind could ethical value accrue; and also human beings tendto become less significant the more there are of them (as inthe proverbially faceless crowd and the statis tical erasure of

subjectivity). The city must be thought of as infrastructure,movement and events rather than mass, otherwise it is sheeralienation. One could read Piled up Stuff... as a critique of com-mercialism, in that the only single category that gets moremeaningful the more uncontrollably it grows, is money – nomatter which way you turn it. Thereby it increases its facil-ity for exchanging, circulating and consuming other things.With four photographs, exchangeable between each other,Piled Up Stuff is the Conceptualist’s resistance to capital’s ir-rational laws of commercial flows.

Lasse Schmidt Hansen’s works aren’t prone to schopen-hauerian pessimism. On the contrary, they re-focus our at-tention. By permitting and performing breakdowns in pre-conceived orders they demonstrate that there is a pos sibilityof subjective perception to detect error. This doesn’t imply

any purity of perception (as he often shows us, the humanisn’t a machine even on the best of days) and it is only the

beginning of t he story, because after we h ave detected theerror we are faced with the challenge to live with the dif-ference thus produced. This is when experience can beginanew, in zones of indetermination where art produces itsown truths.”

— ,

.

, :

: To start with I would like to askyou about the origins of the Tender Museum projectthat took place in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (26.02–03.05.2009). The earlier projects you realised with NeilCummings (such as Capital , Tate Modern, London 2001)

operated within a context of institutional critique – thedismantling and analysis of power structures and theprocesses of generating and redistributing symboliccapital. The Enthusiasts exhibition (CCA UjazdowskiCastle, Warsaw 2004) expanded this context to apolitical one, which by way of questioning the socialproduction of leisure time in late capitalism triggeredan analysis of the most private and intimate areas of life.I touch upon this as I see the Enthusiasts project bothformally and textually as closest to the Tender Museum,which has embraced an even more intimate dimension.

: Ewa, when you ask aboutsubjectivities and their relationship to the institution, inthis case Muzeum Sztuki (MS), I began by thinking howthe museum was established and how much of its originsare still present in the encounter we might have with ittoday.

This particular institution has strong foundations inthe realm of artists’ friendships and their gifts. For me

this suggests an already distinct beginning related to andaffecting the mechanisms of dissemination. Establishingan art collection at MS was made through a gift to thecitizens of Łódź. Such a generous act and a culturallysignificant gesture still prevail in the museum today andneeds to be distributed as part of an accumulated culturalcapital. The values embedded in the collection are ensuredonly by maintaining their cultural relevance throughpublic engagement. The work of the original founders –members of the ‘a.r.’ group including Henryk Stażewski,Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński amongothers – has been continued in the context of new

institutional and political demands of the post-war era.In the case of MS we also encounter a somewhat unusualsituation, an institutional exception, where the PoznańskiPalace on Więckowskiego St. for most of its post period housed both the public museum and the home

of its director Ryszard Stanisławski, his wife UrszulaCzartoryska and their daughter Olga.This situation inspired me to look more closely at the

impact of privacy in its public manifestations. It seemedimportant to examine how the private lives marked byfriendships with artists, curators and writers, professionaland family trips, gardening in the courtyard of themuseum, parties and scenes of domesticity, and all thatsocial backdrop, contributed to the public sphere, throughdonations, special exhibitions, lectures, loans, and thefamous Sundays in the Museum. This ongoing informaldialogue between the two spheres is often renderedinvisible in the staging of exhibition displays but appearsto have determined how the museum functioned duringthe twenty-five years of Stanisławski ’s directorship.The writing of history seen through subjectivities andmarginalisation, is a theme that has been most fullydeveloped in the Enthusiasts⁰¹ project. With it our mainconcern was to investigate how it was possible for a whole

class of creative people and their production to disappearfrom culture with the introduction of political changes in1989. Our work as artists resided in establishing a platform,the exhibition, and an online archive, by re-introducingthe values of amateur production under communism tonew audiences.

...: But how do you engage in an institutional critique

01 Enhusiass rom Amaeur Film Clubs. Marysia Lewandowska & NeilCummings, CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, .–..,Łukasz Ronduda, ed. : www.enthusiastsarchive.net

Miseenscène of gender politics a conversation between Marysia Lewandowska & Ewa Małgorzata Tatar

Uniled, ,

: . ń

while employing the perspective or context of ai li d i di id l

Czartoryska as a professional couple, looking more closelyh h i hi i lif d k h d bli


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marginalised individual?..: The Tender Museum project proposes a differentcritical and discursive space, where questions of gender,care, and attention are articulated by re-positioning thevoice of one individual, that of curator and critic UrszulaCzartoryska . If there was something missing in myperception of how the museum discloses and discussesits own history, it was the role of women as publicintellectuals. My line of enquiry was to speculate on therelationship between the distinct spheres of the privateand public, testing their boundaries and finding the gaps.I detected a connection between the marginalisationof women and representations of public life, in the waythat Hannah Arendt writes so eloquently about: “The

emergence of society – the rise of housekeeping, itsactivities, problems, and organizational devices – fromthe shadowy interior of the household into the light ofthe public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changedalmost beyond recognition the meaning of the twoterms and their significance for the life of the individualand the citizen.”⁰² The Latin origin of the word privacyindicates the state of being deprived of something. Soit is all the more important to perhaps link privacyand marginalisation, to trace exclusions from publicparticipation inherent in the organisational forms ofpublic institutions. I was attempting to interrogate a spacewhere certain contributions remained unacknowledged,as there were no structures, or systems through whichthey could enter public consciousness. The writingof histories relies on connecting different intensitiesand in tracing omissions. And if one of the roles ofa contemporary art museum is to activate different

communities of discourse, we need to create structuresand to insist on the inclusion of women as well as otherunder-represented groups.

...: Could you give some details of the professional andprivate relationship between Ryszard Stanisławski andUrszula Czartoryska, two significant figures associatedwith the post-war history of Muzeum Sztuki?

..: I was more interested in Stanisławskiand

02 Hannah Arendt, The Public and he Privae Realm, in Hannah Arendt,The Human Condiion, New York 1959, p. 35.

at how their partnership in life and work shaped a publicinstitution. Since I had access to their private archiveof personal photographs, I was struck by how disparateevents such as family holidays, dinners with friends,

birthday parties and professional tr ips formed a coherentwhole. And yet it was not just a picture of a life style. Theirengagement in the cultural life of the ‘West’ during theirtwenty-five years at MS, was marked by a busy travelitinerary to seminal events in the art world calendar:Documenta , the Venice and Sao Paolo Biennials, combinedwith, for example, pictures taken during vacations in ruralPoland. The photographs included in my project don’tnecessarily attempt to unveil biographical aspects but arefunctioning as an extended enquiry into the politics of

representation. Their status cannot be properly assessedin any social or cultural terms unless they are exposedto public scrutiny. By placing the sequence of imagesinside the museum I would like to encourage reflectionon Stanisławski ’s and Czartoryska ’s intellectual originsand place their personal bond as a significant factorcontributing to the experience of Muzeum Sztuki in itspublic role.

...: The form of your installation in MS is very preciselyconstructed, as if calculated with the viewer’s potentialmovement in mind, perhaps predetermining one’sreception and emotive reading.

..: On many previous occasions I have referred to theprocesses of exhibition practice, which I perceive as anintegral part of the work of art, especially pertinentto museum discourse and the language of display. Theorganisation of any given space, physical as well as cultural,encourages exploration, not only of the spatial conditions

but also the embedded histories. The Poznański Palacehas been the location of Muzeum Sztuki since 1948 andpresents us with an architecturally and socially hybridspace, a combination of domestic functions and therepresentational. A suite of rooms whose original featureshave partly been obliterated to accommodate museumgalleries, with their temporary walls and screened offwindows, still impose a strong sense of interior identity.With the assistance of London based architect RomanHałat, I proposed to treat the succession of galleries asa series of interconnected cells or nodes, which visitorscould inhabit for different periods of time. By following

: Marysia Lewandowska,

Tender Museum, , : . ń

: Marysia Lewandowska,

Tender Museum, , : . ń

International Women’s Day at

the Muzeum Sztuki

Olga Stanisławska in the front

of Marysia Lewandowska‘s


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the sequence, a visitoris encouraged to movequickly through some ofthe rooms and to considerstaying longer in otherswhere seating is providedto create a more intimateenvironment. One ofthe most importantelements in the process ofstructuring the receptionof archival materialsincluded in the project,which are all withoutexception audio visual,were the decisions aboutaudience engagement.While visiting any museumwe are part of a social body, as individuals inour singularity but also asvisitors belonging to a community. For most of theinhabitants of Łódź, MS is a very familiar destination, somy intention was to incorporate some of that familiarityand yet to disrupt the habits of museum behaviour. Eachroom was treated differently, and referenced otherkinds of spaces. The colour control bars belonging to theexperience of television filled the first room simulating

being inside the ‘box’ while watching a behind thescenes 1976 broadcast from MS itself. The self-referentialand self-reflexive elements of experiencing the well-rehearsed route immediately alerted the visitor to adifferent set of possible narratives when entering. Centralto the experience of the project as a whole was looselystaging the interior of a radio-recording studio, wherethe visitor was implicated in the act of listening. The soft,foam-lined cell of a sound-proofed room lit by a warmsource of light, with two armchairs facing each other,provided conditions for a particular kind of attention. ARecovered Conversation 2009–1991, now one of the new

purchases for the Muzeum’s collection, is a constructedconversation with Urszula Czartoryska, taking excerptsfrom her Radio Łódź interview recorded in 1991 andadding my own recording in 2009. By editing myselfinto the script I am performing the gesture of re-vision,shifting emphasis from simply presenting the archivalsources, to intervening into the their potential meaning.

As Czartoryska ’s original interview interrogates therelationship between artist and critic, artist and museum,I am re-connecting those themes from within the projectitself.

...: A crucial aspect in your work is an engagement withthe archive. In this instance, we have been lookingat the conflation between private and institutionalarchives. What do you see as their specificities? Whatdid they unearth for you? Were there surprises? Whatwere your initial expectations and how did theychange? Along what kind of trajectory did your ideas

the Muzeum Sztuki,

March ,

on its representation by themedia, and understandingwhat kind of imageswere constructed for awider public. Followingmy current interestsin the dissemination ofculture, and questionsof intellectual property,my focus fell on audiorecordings, films,

broadcasts and photographs.And it is within the contextof this wider research thatI was introduced to thefamily archive, which OlgaStanisławska donatedto Muzeum Sztuki. Thecollection of photographsformed an archive of herlate mother, the curator

and critic, Urszula Czartoryska and was not previouslyincorporated into any public institution. The archives ofher late father Ryszard Stanisławski were deposited manyyears earlier at the Institute of Art at the Polish Academyof Sciences in Warsaw. This is an example of how theircontributions were valued differently and therefore whatplace they, as individuals, occupy in the historical accounts

of the Muzeum. The ideas around tenderness and affectemerged in two ways. There was a clear indication of howimportant it was for Stanisławski to run the museum asa caring organisation, both in his relations with staff andin his strong commitment to educational and audiencefocused projects. The most extensive and inspiring werethe annual gatherings known as Sundays in the Museum.Bringing together different types of activities, from brass bands, fashion shows, ar tists’ talks, vegetable stalls, t heirludic nature didn’t feel like a token populist gesture, itgenuinely promoted social exchanges using the museumas an engine and inspiration. It was also worth considering

of Marysia Lewandowskas

Tender Museum, ,

: . ń

move before they materialised as an exhibition? Atwhat stage did your enquiry into the archive pavethe way towards conceptualising the Tender Museum project?

..: It is important to remember that I was invited toparticipate in what was a larger project called WorkingTitle: Archive. My research and working methods were very

much encouraged by the curator of the project, MagdalenaZiółkowska . We spent many hours together watching filmmaterial and listening to recordings without having a veryclear plan. The project grew in its ambition through thespirit of openness and mutual support, from conversations,and in the editing process. I spent eighteen monthsresearching publicly available archives, beginning withMuzeum Sztuki itself, as well as Television and Radio, theFilm School and Educational Film Production companyarchives, all based in Łódź.

In all of those collections I tried to identify materialsdirectly related to the Muzeum. This enquiry was centred

the presence of family life spilling over to the museum.Scenes of untroubled domesticity mixed with more official

...: This last question is particularly important – onthe one hand the project’s title alludes to a certain

The lecture room at the Muzeum Sztuki,

Więckowskiego Street


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Sce es o u t oub ed do est c ty ed w t o e o c afunctions populate many of the archival photographs. Asyou know, in Latin, the root of the word curator is curare, aperson taking care or the guardian. I had an overwhelmingimpression that the success of Muzeum Sztuki in its publicmandate was closely connected to the economies of affect,often marginalised or excluded from procedures endorsingthe existing systems of representation.

...: How did the museum respond to your proposal– what kind of emotions were triggered by yoursubtle questioning of the myth surrounding RyszardStanisławski ?

..: The process of de-mythologising the figure of RyszardStanisławski was not part of my original intention. I wastrying to connect the lesser known acts of generosityperformed by him and Czartoryska , and present them asindicative of a set of omissions inherent in the self-imageof Muzeum Sztuki. It was during his directorship that theposition of this iconic cultural institution was secured.Was that due just to his artistic decisions and politicalalliances or did his ethical conduct play an importantrole? In this instance it is worth problematising historiesof individual achievements by opening up questions ofgender, internal politics, and by challenging the separationof private and public interests.

t e o e a d t e p oject s t t e a udes to a ce tasensitivity and thus catalyses the question of affect, andon the other by means of an aesthetic subtlety it draftsa precise history of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, whileinterrogating the questions of power. I refer to this, asI’m interested in the conflation between sensitivityand decisiveness, which in terms of your practice I haveconsidered as ‘feminist curating’. How then to maintaina position that at once reconstructs an existing orderand yet also proposes new solutions? Not oppressiveones, but rather solutions that rework affect – theauthor’s emotions, as well as those of the institutionand viewer.

..: This is a question of how hierarchies and powerrelationships are mediated. Mediation and negotiation areat the centre of this project; both are addressing the agencyof the artist inside an institutional structure. How doesthe museum empower an artist, and how does the artistnegotiate a space for herself in the existing narrativesof the museum and its history? Additionally, how doesreversing the roles of artist and curator contribute toreading the mechanisms of power? By re-inserting thevoice of Urszula Czartoryska, I authorised the presenceof a person, whose contributions, at least as far as I couldsee, found no proper representation. Constructing adialogue between myself and the historically marginalised

figure of the female curator led to a ‘fictional’encounter and provided me with an importantgenerational link. Acting as an artist I felt noobligation to reproduce an existing systemof power relations, so I decided to complicatethe reading by introducing affect, as a morecontentious site in the construction of

institutional history. The museum can be seenas a contemporary ‘social factory’, with thearchive as its silent engine. But like all factoriesit is a place where production, disseminationand reception must be equally addressed.

From the perspective of the twelve monthssince the opening of the project, I wonder if

by creating a mise-en-scène of gender politicswith its alternative narrative, a rupture inthe visitor’s habitual experience has beenachieved.

-, Marysia Lewandowska, Tender Museum,

, :

2225.04.2009 ★ Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź

Working Title: Archive workshop

The workshop aimed at fostering criticalreflection on the potential of an institutionalarchive that came to occupy a key position in

contemporary artistic and curatorial practices. The

archive collection of Muzeum Szuki, includingdocuments, audio recordings, and photographs,

provided a point of departure for invited guests

(artists, curators, art historians) to analyse archive

theory in a broad context, in relation to research

in the field of history, sociology, and the history of

ideas, as well as document-gathering practices.

The workshop included the following sessions:

★ David Dibosa, Giving Voice★ Lia Perjovschi, Art (Between Design

Your Self and Funky Business)★ Marysia Lewandowska & Lisa

Le Feuvre, Future Conversation★ Marysia Lewandowska & Anony

Hudek, The Lover’s Voice★ Shepherd Seiner, Working Title:

Archive – S(h)elf-Help★ Wha, How & or Whom? (Sabina

Sabolović, Naaša Ilić) & Cho Dela?(Dmiry Vilensky, Alexandr Skidan),Between a Rock and a Hard Place

★ Wha, How & or Whom? (SabinaSabolović, Naaša Ilić) & Prelom kolekiv( Jelena Vesić, Dušan Grlja), PoliticalPractices of [Post–] Yugoslav Art

Workshop participants

Łukasz Biskupski,

Przemysław Sanecki and Marta

Gendera, : . ń

ę g

Marysia Lewandowska and Shepherd Steiner

20.0513.06.2009 ★Labor, Budapest

Parallel Chronologies documentary and research exhibition

The Coninuous Ar Class Novi SadNeo-Avan-garde o he s-s,


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The Invisible Hisory o Exhibiions project organised byranzi. hu in Budapest included a documentary andresearch exhibition, Parallel Chronologies , and a symposium.It looked at the history and current interpretations of the

exhibition, as the dominant format of contemporary art

production and presentation. ‘History’ in this context is

interpreted as constructed narratives based on events

that constitute shis in the notions of art (art history)

and the modes of its presentation (exhibition history).

In Eastern Europe, progressive art events could only

happen in ‘second publicity’, so they are deeply embedded in

the historical conditions of the public sphere. While in Western

countries mainstream art institutions hosted curatorial

group exhibitions that constitute landmarks in the history

“In the framework of the collaboration with the Invisible History of Exhibitions, we are organisingan archive exhibition in Labor in May 2009, whichendeavours to place the events of the Hungarian art sceneof the 1960s and 1970s into an international context.Alongside Hungarian archival documents, works, andpublications, we also present two similar projects from

Belgrade and Serbia.Within the Hungarian art scene of the 1960s and 1970s,the majority of progressive events took place in the greyzone of non-official exhibition spaces, which is why theirinternational visibility and availability for research hasremained fragmentary and difficult to convey. Numerouschronologies of the era, built upon each other, have been produced: from the Magyar Műhely’s (HungarianAtelier) annual art almanac, through the list of eventscompiled by Dóra Maurer and László Beke in 1980, andup to the chronologies of the Artpool Research Centreand C Foundation. In addition to chronologies, manyhave treated the era in map and collection/museumformats, such as NETRAF with his Portable IntelligenceIncrease Museum , Little Warsaw’s Only Artist project, orinternationally Irwin’s East Art Map.

Instead of aiming at an objective history gained fromthe synthesis or reconciliation of differing individualpoints of view we would like to trace the idiosyncraticpattern of difference and accordance, the map of blind-spots and legends. It is to this end that we ask your help.Name ten events or exhibitions of key importance to youfrom the Hungarian art scene of the 1960s and 1970s! Youmay also explain your responses.

Thank you for your contribution,

Dóra Hegyi and Zsuzsa László”

— ,

, , – ,

. .

Parallel Chronologies documentary and research exhibition Dóra Hegyi & Zsuzsa László★kuda.org Novi Sad★Prelom kolektiv Belgrade

of exhibitions, in Eastern Europe paradigmatic events oen

happened in private flats and off-site spaces outside of official

art institutions. Consequently, a different methodology must

be introduced to enable the inclusion of Eastern European

events in the international discourse on exhibition theory.

Parallel Chronologies investigated the exhibition as acultural phenomenon and genre in its own right, focusing

on the period determined by different versions of state

socialisms in Eastern Europe. The intention of the project

was to break with the usual ways that international and

local exhibitions and publications ignore or exoticise this

field. To this end we presented a network of professional

relationships, exhibitions, events, and art spaces, rather

than the usual static display of artworks from the period.

As a starting point the

research addressed the genre

of chronology, an important

channel for mediating art

events of a particular epoch.

Chronologies play a defining

role in transforming small

events into histories and

canons, especially in the

case of Eastern European art

events, that oen happened

in the ‘second publicity’

during the s and s.

For this reason we

collected and compared

chronologies of theperiod, composed

either synchronically or

retrospectively. Selecting

events and related

documentation we looked

at why some projects

gain significance as soon

as they happen, making

them the starting points

for anecdotes and legends,

while others are quickly

Pages from the chronology published in the exhibition catalogue Künsler aus Ungarn,

, Wilhelmshaven, compiled by Dóra Mauer, -

forgoen or can only be interpreted and their significance

understood when viewed from a later perspective.

In the framework of the exhibition, two archives dealing

with neo-avant-garde art from the region, from Belgrade

and Novi Sad were presented. Prelom kolekiv has studiedseveral significant events at SKC, the Suden Culural Cenre in Belgrade in the s, and kuda.org media centre hascollected the most important documents of the neo-avant-

garde in Novi Sad.

As well as these documents from the s and s,

progressive art events in Hungary were shown. The

exhibition documentation from Hungary was structured

around research that asked a number of Hungarian art

professionals which art events from this period were

most significant in relation to their own practice.

kuda.org

: Parallel Chronologies

Case Studies selecion★


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We were interestedto find out whatpublic roles and exhibition

opportunities the era’s

political and social climate

provided, what connections it

had with international trends,

and how events defined the

relation between art and the

public. To this end, we put

in parallel the activity of the

various generations, as well

as events that were held at

official (public), professional,

and ad hoc exhibition venues,

such as culture houses or

clubs, or those that didn’t go

beyond the planning stage,

or were banned. Through

the selection we were

considering events, which in

one way or another shaped

or renewed the exhibition

genre, reinterpreting the

exhibition space in relation

to the art object or through

the nature of a show. As

we were also looking for an

answer to the questions of

how an exhibition becomes

an event and what canhappen at an exhibition, we

endeavoured to explore

the connections between

shows that included a static

presentation of art work

and various actionist and

performative practices.

In Hungary between the s and thes, all public exhibitions had to havepermission from the relevant authorities

– on the basis of a precise list of artworks

– and were fully financed by state institu-

tions. Those tendencies that were not ap-

proved had to find alternative sites, ways

of presentation and self-management.

Many important events, especially in the

first half of the s, took place in private

flats and similar venues.

Most Hungarian and international chro-

nologies that deal with neo-avant-garde

art in Hungary refer to the first Hungar-

ian happening, The Lunch (in memoriamBau khan), as a point of departure. Theevent was organised in at a private

cellar by two poets– Tamás Szenjóby andGábor Alorjay – who were in their earlytwenties.

About invitation cards were dis-

tributed; photo and film documentation

was arranged, and journalists were also

invited. The happening was very radical,

pushing the limits of the participants’ and

audience’s physical and mental tolerance.

Although only about thirty viewers were

present, this event redefined how art was

produced and presented in the following

years. The secret police filed a report on it,

the concept of the ‘happening’, as a dan-gerous and insane manifestation of dis-

order coming from the imperialist West

emerged in the regular press; even in the

columns of humour magazines, recollec-

tions of the happening oen contradicted

each other without any objective refer-

ence point. Public evaluation of the genre

was banned.

SUMMARISING REPORT AND ACTION PLANOn 25 June 1966, the first Hungarian happeningtook place in Budapest.The English word happening indicates some kindof event. The movement developed in the 1920sand 1930s and can be traced back to the Futuristand Dadaist initiatives. (…)The concept of the happening was brought toHungary from Europe by László Moholy (anarchitect of Hungarian origin) (…)A happening, as regards its philosophicalaspect, is a declaration of nihilism, darkness,irrationalism and the denial of healthy humanactivity. (…)

[The description of the Lunch by an agent of thesecret police present at the event follows here.]

“(…) Action PlanBased on the above, it can be stated that thespreading of the happening phenomenonis harmful to the intellectual and politicaldevelopment of youth. Furthermore, it isan occurrence that goes against progress,and facilitates the decentralising politics ofimperialist circles. In order to decrease its harmful effects on

today’s youth, the spreading of happeningsmust be prevented.

T he key organising figures of Hungarianhappenings, as well as their possible foreigncontacts, must be placed under surveillance.

By way of open administrative and operativemeans the main circles of the organisers must

be broken up. Public appearances by the organisers of

happenings must be prevented. It must be made impossible for them to use publicforums for spreading and popularising thehappening phenomenon (...)”

— : . - . -.

:...★ excerpts from the exhibition guide by Dóra Hegyi and Zsuzsa László

The Lunch

(in memoriam

Bau Khan),

,

:

“How did you encounter the genreof the happening, what did youfind interesting/inspiring in it at


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Hfind interesting/inspiring in it atthat time in 1966?While I was already fed up with the ridiculouspsychoanalytic kitsch of Abstract Expressionismin the mid-1960s, I also had unsolvable, generalsemantic problems with poetry. In 1965 Isuddenly made – as a spontaneous break withmy conventional mentality – recipes of someobjects (intermedial per se) – that qualified as

‘pop’ and ‘conceptual things’. I planned to showthem publicly, but the internal and externalsituation was not yet ready. I wrote – stillusing the earlier, ‘metaphysical’ approach – my

‘last poem’ in January 1966, and was waitingparalysed for many weeks for new inspiration.(…)

At that sparklingly fresh moment ofenlightenment an awkward and despisingarticle was published in the May 1966 issue ofthe periodical Film, Theatre, Music mentioningsome happenings in the US and Western Europe.Despite the author’s negativity, the extremeimportance of the happening as such wasapparent. I came across the idea, and the namesof Allan Kaprow and Joseph Beuys, for the firsttime in this article. The recipes of the objects Imade some months earlier were substantiated.

(…)It is difficult to find something more basic,more earthly, more physical than eating andunloading – so we did that. It is difficult tofind something more evident, more accurate,more contemporary than a cellar at a time ofunderground ideas and practices. It is difficultto find a better sub-title than the reference tothe supposed builder of the cellar. It is difficultto find something man-made not suitable forits destruction. It is difficult to f

art always has its consequences 2010

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