Jan Świdziński

exhibition catalogue, DAP Gallery, Warsaw

In Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions” there is a story of an artist who paints a picture of an orange band against a green background and calls it the “Temptation of St Anthony”. Asked who Saint Anthony was and whom he was tempted, he says that he does not know and does not want to know.
This is not my case and has never been. It is not true that I started from the manifesto “Art as Contextual Art” though it opens this exhibition covering the last twenty years. I started much earlier as a painter. Painting was very dear to me and has remained such. I chose to study in the studio of the Capist painter Professor Cybis. I was thoroughly educated and found myself in a well-ordered world governed by lucid principles binding in all places at all times. As suggested by Matisse, art was a comfortable armchair from which the surrounding world might be contemplated. Unfortunately the realities were not too congenial at that time and the armchair was soon removed from beneath my seat.
It was quite early that I began to receive books and journals from the West. What I read and saw in them had nothing to do with the atmosphere of the contemplation of the world from a comfortable armchair. There were Jackson Pollock’s drippings in New York, and in France, the last stronghold of good art, there was Yves Klein. Art was beginning to look like a dog on a leash trying to break free. One had a feeling it would succeed in it at some time. Meanwhile the avant-garde dog would turn back, now and then barking and grinning, but there was always the long leash to connect him with the good and generally binding concept of modernist art rooted somewhere in the Renaissance.
In the early 1960s the Fluxus movement made its appearance. I later made friends with many of its artists. Then come Minimal Art. In 1967 o member of the group, Sol LeWitt, published “Paragraphs On Conceptual Art” in Art Forum where he stipulated that art should avoid displaying material qualities, for they divert one’s attention from the understanding of ideas.
A watchmaker should know what a watch is, and an artist should know what art is. So it seemed to me, in which I differed from Vonnegut’s Karabakian. In 1969 Joseph Kosuth published his famous text “Art after Philosophy” where he defined the position of ‘Pure Concept Art’. It became obvious that art had broken from the leash. Did it happen at the instance of art alone, as a result of its straining at the leash? Yes and no. No, because – as observed by Baudrillard – our entire culture has shifted from seeing the world in terms of analogies perceived with the naked eye to convert homology relations. Consequently in art the material qualities of a work, i.e. what we can see, have ceased to be the most important.
Maciunas of the Fluxus group stated, and all agreed with him, that the drinking of a glass of water by an artist could be art just like painting a picture. Marcel Duchamp might have said something similar. Thus everything could by art. This in fact implied the negation of the existence of art as an autonomous field. And yet, as our daily practice shows, art continues to exist, and is by no means ready to dematerialize. In 1970 I wrote an article entitled “Dispute on the Existence of Art” which, to my surprise, met with much interest, especially among the young (who were only just making their debut in the art world and found it easier to accept the no-leash situation). The article voiced doubts known from other sources, but it brought no positive conclusions. I arrived at these several years later when formulating the main points of my manifesto “Art as Contextual Art”. It was meant as a discussion with the position of Concept Artists and a polemic with Kosuth’s “Art after Philosophy”.
Theses of contextual art were publicized in Poland in 1975 and appeared in print in English in 1976. Late in 1976 they were the subject of an international conference in Toronto where it came to o discussion between the Art and Language of New York with Kosuth in the lead and myself and the group L’Art Sociologique of Paris and Canada. We finally agreed on basic issues. From Canada I went to the States to work with Kosuth and artists of his orientation. A year later I took part in another conference, organized by L’Art Sociologique in Paris. Another meeting took part at the Remont Gallery in Warsaw during the conference “Art as activity in the context of reality”. It was attended by artists and theorists of thirty-five countries and closed with a formal agreement on a joint action of a Polish-Canadian Contextual group, Collectif L’Art Sociologique of France and Arte de Systemo in Latina America. As might have been expected, this success of Contextual art marked the beginning of its troubles, of attacks levied at us from left and right.
In accordance with the premise’s of contextual art, we organized a group of ‘Local Activities’ together with Roman and Anna Kutera ond Leszek Mrożek. I collaborated with the Remont and Mała Galleries in Warsaw, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Wrocław, the Labirynt in Lublin, the Film Form Workshop in Łódź, the Znak (Sign) Gallery in Białystok, and with many artists connected with, or close to, the contextual movement. In 1979 I was Visiting Professor at the University of Calgary and in 1985 at the Nova Scotia College of Art. I publish my books on art in English abroad, unable (unfortunately to this day) to publish them in my native tongue. More in-depth information about my activities is published at the end of this catalogue.
How do I see contextual art, the premises of which I formulated twenty years ago and have developed in my work and books and articles? To what extent has life confirmed my diagnoses of that time?
l have said that the steady acceleration of changes in contemporary civilization adds to the ambiguity of concepts and values. We live in a world of signs losing relation to what they are to signify. Objects and situations acquire meaning to us only when we perceive them in a defining context. The established division into the world of art and non-artistic reality is beginning to vanish. Everything may become art; what is decisive is the context, the artistic situation: an exhibition, a museum, information published in a journal or a book.
The Post-modernist simulacrum, the sign of a sign in the mirror of which another sign is reflected; the surface behind which the real world is not concealed and, at the same time, the unprecedented dependence of art on the Art Worlds context is one aspect of a process heralded by contextualism. At the some time, the artist’s dependence on the context has placed us in quite a different situation. We do not produce physical objects or ideas, we do not have to do it, we only define our positions with regard to them. What we convey is our attitude towards things… Art is no longer a being defined once and for all, it bas become a mode of being banal reality, between the natural and the artificial bas become o matter of convention. Just like the border between myself as an artist and man, between artistic and non-artistic action.
What bas happened to art has also happened to culture: it has become a set of norms, values and rules used by society for the purpose of communication. ‘Everything goes’, Fayerabend said, everything bas become relative. Contemporary art, the most sensitive part of culture, only informs us about it. If everything is allowed, the choice of the context in which I would like to exist and the choice of an attitude is my business as an artist. This is my freedom and my risk. This is why so many of us seek to catch the broken leash and burden another with their risk.
A few more words on what I wanted to show at this exhibition. Certainly not all that I have done for these twenty years. This would not be possible. Most of my works were deliberately ephemeral, intended for a definite context in which they were to be interpreted. I did not like to show the some in various places, and if I did, which was because I could think of nothing else, I introduced changes taking the new circumstances into account. In a sense, I am doing it now. I am looking at the history of the last twenty years at this very moment. I am not showing ready-made objects, or things, or even ideas. I am not interested in it. What is on display is my attitudes, situations, my own reactions. If I touch on social issues, which I sometimes do, it is not as a result of a priori assumptions but the fact that I live in a definite context which is always in a sense a social context. As I demonstrate my attitudes and reveal my reactions, I am sometimes, but not always, in trouble.
I have never been an expert in installation and performance art, in the use of photography or text. Even when I used a brush, which I have done too often for the last twenty years, it is only as a medium like others, a means by which to convey my message, and not as a thing as such.
Being static, my exhibition does not permit me to show performances constituting a large part of my work. I like them for their ephemeral quality and their immediacy. They are like life, and this is what interests me the most. I start with the “Manifesto of Art as Contextual Art”, preserving the styles of those years, but with necessary omissions. Wherever possible, I have sought to reflect in the arrangement of the show both the chronology and the division into problems that engaged my attention at a certain point. For the most part they have not been invented by myself but resulted from the peculiar context of time and place.
What are the implications for the future? Here I agree with the artist Karabakan: I do not know and I do not want to know. I do not know how this tempting of St. Antony by Satan in me and others will end.