Chance Operations – an extract from Dźwięki elektrycznego ciała
This is an extract from Dźwięki elektrycznego ciała, an exhibition catalogue accompanying this show at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland. There is a review in Polish here and another from the August edition of The Wire here. ♦ John Cage’s advocacy of indeterminacy and Fluxus’s interests in events were matched by new conceptualizations of … Read more
‘Laughing at My Head’ – The ‘Immature’ Art of Neue Bieremiennost
I was commissioned to write a piece about the early years of artist Mirosław Bałka and his colleagues when they sailed under the flag of ‘Neue Bieremiennost’. The piece appears in a book written and edited by Kasia Redzisz and Karol Sienkiewicz with the title Świadomość Neue Bieriemiennost (Fundacja Open Art Projects, Warsaw, 2012). ♦ … Read more
Two books on Polish graphic design …
Against All Odds. Polish Graphic Design 1919-1949 (also published in Polish as Nie gęsi. Polskie projektowanie graficzne 1919–1949) by Piotr Rypson. (Karakter, Kraków, 2011) Projekt: The Polish journal of visual art and design (Unit 05) edited by Adrian Shaughnessy (with essays by Charlotte West and Edgar Bąk) (Unit Editions, London, 2011) The Polish Poster School of … Read more
Architecture and the Image of the Future in the People’s Republic of Poland
The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases … Karl Marx, Capital[1] What would communism look like? And what would its material form be? Ideologues in Eastern Europe after 1945 spent much time and energy persuading the citizens of the new people’s republics that this … Read more
Paradise Lost?
This piece was published in Piktogram in 2005. ♦ The Art of Home In 1956 a member of the British art police set up home. Jim Eade, a former curator at the Tate Gallery, decided to turn his picturesque house, Kettle’s Yard, in the university city of Cambridge into a gallery for the defence of … Read more
Roman Cieślewicz, Changement de Climat, 1976-77
In the 1970s Cieślewicz turned his scalpel on the magazines which had given him employment in Paris in the 1960s. In a number of commissioned and self-initiated series, he mixed contemporary commercial images with reproductions of historical paintings. Renaissance artists Durer, Uccello and Bronzino as well as David all feature. He called the resulting works … Read more
Sacrifice, Madness, Ruins and Other Polish Dreams
This essay was written for the catalogue accompanying The Power of Fantasy. Modern and Contemporary Art from Poland at BOZAR in Brussels, summer 2011. ♦ 46476243 The Spirit that Outlasts Matter On first inspection, Jakub Ziółkowski’s painting The Great Battle under the Table (Wielka bitwa pod stołem, 2006) combines the heroic and the domestic. The … Read more
Dlouhý’s ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ (occasional notes on posters)
Bedřich Dlouhý was an occasional poster artist and book designer. Better known as a surrealist painter and a member of the youthful Šmidrové group in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, he designed posters for art house films directed by Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini as well as less cerebral fare from Hollywood studios. Dlouhý adopted ‘strangeness’ … Read more
Cieślewicz’s ‘Forefather’s Eve’ (occasional notes on posters)
This poster produced by Roman Cieślewicz in 1967 has become an iconic image in the history of the People’s Republic of Poland. Designed to promote a new performance of Adam Mickiewicz’s nineteenth century poetic drama, Forefather’s Eve (Dziady), Cieślewicz’s design captures the simmering frustration with Soviet control over Poland. The central motif seems to be a desiccated landscape or a figure with a hole … Read more
Speaking about exhibitions
Last night I went to a talk – of sorts – at the RCA called ‘Spoken Exhibition’ which represents ‘historic’ and yet unbuilt buildings, unmade works of art and lost music scores in the form of a radio play or, perhaps, a spoken opera. It was performed with a script and minimal props – a … Read more
