April 29 – June 30, 2015
Profile Foundation, Franciszkańska 6, Warsaw
In the mid-1970s, Józef Robakowski started working on a film devoted to the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź and the artists associated with it. The shift that had taken place on the eve of its making marked a new quality not only for the film’s subject matter but also for the wider institutional context of 1970s art. The result was The Living Gallery, a film presenting the Polish neo-avant-garde community of 1974/1975. In an accompanying essay, Aspects Motivating the Making of The Living Gallery, Robakowski wrote that the project’s goal was to ‘discover the mentality of today’s artists, to shed light on their artistic consciousness’. There was, however, some waywardness to that. The film presents the author’s selection of over 20 artists of various disciplines, each of whom has been given 90 seconds to synthetically portray their practice. The resulting montage features Natalia LL, Jerzy Bereś, Andrzej Partum, Zbigniew Warpechowski, Zbigniew Dłubak and many others, including young artists associated with Robakowski. At the same time, revealing the ‘element that is pushing the boundaries of our art’, The Living Gallery went beyond the artistic standards promoted in People’s Poland. With his film, Robakowski effected yet another important shift, an institutional one this time. Independent of physical museum thresholds, it became a performative gallery, an avant-garde statement by Robakowski not only as an artist but also as an art curator and theoretician. It thus originated the idea of an independent artistic institution, developed later through the Exchange Gallery [Galeria Wymiany].
Materials preserved by Robakowski in the Exchange Gallery archive document the making of The Living Gallery through testimonies of the featured artists and the photographs of Zygmunt Rytka, the production’s official photographer. The presented mail documentation dates primarily from the turn of 1974/1975, when the artists invited to appear in Robakowski’s ‘contribution film’ discuss with him the details of their planned 90-second-long self-presentations. The texts open with a statement by Robakowski himself; the narrator will utter the same words at the beginning of the film. They sound like a manifesto of this performative group show, which was precursory for an alternative thinking of the artistic institution and its formula.
Like the film’s structure itself, the presented letters, scripts and Rytka’s documentary photographs do not follow any rigid chronology or cause-and-effect chains. From this somewhat private take on the ‘element that is pushing the boundaries of our art’ emerges a wider image of artistic attitudes and of the radical-poetic rhetorics of the featured artists.
Curator: Bożena Czubak
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