JAROSŁAW KOZŁOWSKI
NET

The NET project was one of the most important initiatives of the 1970s avant-garde, bringing together artists from various parts of the world. The idea for NET was formulated in 1971 by artist Jarosław Kozłowski and art critic and historian Andrzej Kostołowski who, in a manifesto  mailed to some 350 artists and critics in Poland and abroad, encouraged artistic collaboration and a free exchange of artistic facts. A network of contacts developed between artists, independent of institutional structures and above political barriers, driven by a wave of art’s conceptualisation, fascination with mail art, and the popularity of subversive attitudes. The idea of free circulation, dialogue, and decentralisation offered an artistic alternative to the political and ideological isolation of Polish culture at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the geopolitical divisions between East and West, the NET spread through exchange between artists based in Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, North and South America. The anarchistic idea posed a challenge to both Eastern Europe’s political status quo and the West’s art market with its commercial mechanisms. The NET’s first presentation, in 1972 in Poznań, at Jarosław Kozłowski’s private home, was interrupted by the secret police; the second one took place the same year at the Club of the Association of Polish Visual Artists (ZPAP) in Poznań. Despite official reprisals, the network of independent contacts expanded in the years that followed, as of 1972 as part of the Akumulatory 2 Gallery started by Jarosław Kozłowski in Poznań. In 2012, the Profile Foundation showed selected documentation and works of NET-associated artists, the first such presentation in forty years.