Łukasz Guzek

It is What it is

published in: exhibition folder, ODA Piotrków Trybunalski, 18 June 2009

Łukasz Guzek: Do you remember the beginnings of your performance?

Jan Świdziński: I do not, I have never made any chronicle of my performances. They usually took place during festivals. I also opened my exhibitions with a performance. I have visited every festival in the world. I organised them here, which made Poland an important centre of performance

Performance activity in Poland started at the I AM festival in 1978, organised by the Remont gallery, directed by Henryk Gajewski, with whom I closely cooperated. It was formally a student gallery, so older people like me or Dłubak were advisors, supervising this venture from behind.

For the first of my performances I surrounded myself with chairs and then I scattered them. In these times it had a political context – that we need to release ourselves from what surrounds us. It was in 1976 in Cracow, in the Krakowska Kuźnica gallery, which had left-wing tendencies, conducted by the late Andrzej Urbański. Then in 1980 I took part in a festival organised by him once more, named ‘Contact. From agitation to contemplation’, which also took place in Cracow. In 1979 I made a performance in Canada. The meeting was organised the French collective, L’Art Sociologique working in Calgary. During this time, my book ‘Art, Society and Self-consciousness’ was published there. From there I went to Western Front in Vancouver. In 1985 I was in Western Front and Halifax, where my stay was organised by Bruce Barber. My important performance in Poland was ‘Bluring’ in Lublin in 1984. I blurred a text drawn on the wall, which also had its political context. In the 1980s I started to make more performances. I took up performance because of my contextual theory and my experience with dance, using body movement and gesture to make a performance.

For me text, installation, photographs, the exhibition that comes from it all and live action create the full composition. It is characteristic of present art, however.

Ł.G. In your texts you often mention that performance is the most important practice for you.

J.Ś. Yes, because it refers to the origins of art, when what we consider as art, has not yet existed. Art covers two human activities: one is performed to produce something; others to express something and communicate with others, for example using gesture, or on a higher level by using words and language. The oldest form of expression is dance, crowds surrounding the altar, people raising their hands in the gesture of prayer. These rituals are given a rhythm by music, which brings order and space, because everyone must do something together. It is accompanied by an oral statement. Greeks have seen this bond between word, music and dance. It was something else than techne, which was creating something, for example a sculpture or painting. Their point of view was not strange, because creating something and expressing it are two different subjects. Combination of these two activities has taken place in the eighteenth century. It is easier then to understand per analogiam processes occurring between performance and music, poetry of sound, what Cage did. It is also close to installation and other types of forms. Our contemporary apostasy from art is not apostasy from art as general, but from formalised art.

Ł.G. You have said that that performance is a key practice of Contextual Art.

J.Ś. What is the main difference between art now and in the past is that the role of the spectator was to recognise what the artist wanted to say. Spectator or listener had no active role, only passive. Today he has an active one. He is incorporated into the work, as in performance, or he has freedom of interpretation. He is able to find something in art just for him. Because everything changes so quickly, our meetings are short, so what really matters are space, time, ambience; not some kind of permanent being, but being in the exact moment, here and now. And also valuing and sensing what is now. We are not discussing values; we are not telling what is right or wrong. Everyone has his own criteria and they cannot be valued, we don’t have a common point of view. Of course, we can like something or not, but that is our personal view. We don’t have a common language. We are meeting people of different cultures. Art is operating now, in this particular moment – it is causing some kind of emotional state, it is associated with something. We alone are constructing our reality, but not necessarily in harmony with the one in which we previously existed. That’s how it is at performance festivals.

But also our reality is just like this – performance. I remember when I was in New York, there was an artist and he had been walking all the time with a long stick in colourful strips . It was his action. He was Andre Cadere. He is mentioned in Paul Ardenne’s book ‘Contextual Art’ as an example of intervention in urban reality. In Poland such interventions were made by the Academy of Movement. Take another example: today films are being made very easily. We don’t have concerns about the way in which they are made(as in structuralism) but we have to capture the moment of reality. This activity has a performance character – this means temporary. Another example is installations – artists today are different from those of the first half of the twentieth century, because they are not attempting to create something pretty, but something opposite – because beauty is not the topic of art now. Duchamp’s ready-mades are also a kind of performance. Today very different things are found as art.

Conversation held in Warsaw 10 June 2009.

tr.Maciej Ostrowski