10, 20, 40, 80, 150, 200…

Writing about Robakowski is a perilous undertaking. Despite the abundance of critical texts, commentaries and self-commentaries, straightforward press reviews and scholarly studies devoted to the artist, Robakowski continues to elude us. Roman Lewandowski writes: “Józef Robakowski is an artist who has stopped surprising us.” This is perverse and thoroughly Robakowskian, since we know that the constant in Robakowski’s work is precisely that he has never stopped surprising us. Robakowski’s art is energy — but everything is energy: we are energy, you are energy and art is energy. This trail is false and may be regarded as an artist’s manipulation. Robakowski calls, “I manipulate!”, only to shout a moment later, “Art is power!” Like an Avant-Garde bluffer, he puts on horns with a solemn expression and makes fools of the critics. Led astray once, the critic is taken in a second and third time, then again and again. Everything Robakowski does looks exceptionally serious. And it is not only what he does. Robakowski himself, through his magnitude — physical as well — may not overwhelm his interlocutor, but certainly overshadows and intimidates them.

How lightly can one treat a large man who says he is joking when somehow no one feels like laughing? Robakowski’s artistic “jokes” are not innocent. Reception of this art does not end with a smile or shrug. His works operate somatically and visually. This is no joke. It is enough to spend a little longer in the gallery during one of his numerous exhibitions and sit facing the Energy Angles or Impulsators. Robakowski himself also acts seriously and intensely. He teaches, lectures and influences successive artists, curators, critics and collectors. Again, this is not a bland, characterless activity that could pass unnoticed. Interventionist texts take the artist to court, sued by a critic whose pride was wounded. Public statements win him enemies who mutter: “Once again he missed an opportunity to keep quiet.” Robakowski is a master and classic who plays not only with art but with himself. In the end, the artist is the butt of the joke too.

His strategy may be called “subversive”, but there appears to be no cool calculation, much less a marketing plan. Collectors have reportedly noticed Robakowski, yet his works prove difficult for the market to digest. Reproduced and copied, they circulate among people and institutions, visually shaping successive audiences. These countless unsigned copies are said to obstruct Robakowski’s market career. But he will not be constrained; he is too prolific to limit himself to editions, celebrate every copy of a film or refuse those who thirst for art. This is why collectors so avidly seek the objects he makes, which cannot be duplicated. Robakowski creates not only films, photographs and objects, but also situations — energetic ones, let us say again. He talks about students, discusses art and comments on other artists’ works — remarkable today, when most creators gaze only at themselves. He criticises critics’ texts and curators’ exhibitions. A conversation with Robakowski is an art in itself. Another encounter with his work and with the man himself is planned at Atlas Sztuki.

Robakowski tells the story of the project and of how, several decades ago, he and his colleagues from the Workshop left a screening of a film by Dora O. A half-hour projection of flowing water at the Knokke-Heist festival tired the young Polish artists, who were bursting with energy. Perhaps they went out for a beer or a conversation. Yet Robakowski did not forget the film. The monotonous pouring of water — subject: nature — repressed from analytical, Conceptual practice ricocheted back years later. According to the artist’s oral account, he had always wanted to visit Niagara Falls in order to do “something” with “it”. We should note here that the experience of nature and its associated sense of the sublime appear only sporadically in Robakowski’s art. I deliberately write of nature, because Robakowski is not concerned with a formal analysis of flowing water or its use in experiments with the medium. The planned installation addresses something entirely different. In the catalogue for the Thermograms exhibition at BWA in Lublin, Robakowski wrote: “Please, give me more current. I like the taste of those volts — 10, 20, 40, 80, 150, 200… Another 10, please — that will be enough! I feel excellent, blissful, good. […] A delicious tingling passes through my body. I feel that THIS ART is becoming pure, because I have no intention to communicate to YOU, although I have become our shared energy screen.”

Commenting on this quotation, Magdalena Ujma drew attention to pleasure, which in her view had been repressed from thinking about art in the Workshop of the Film Form circle. In the context of the total video installation being prepared for Atlas Sztuki, the more interesting moment is the one in which the pleasurable amplification of energy cleanses art and clarifies the “screen”. The artistic subject disappears and dissolves, simultaneously becoming the site upon which the viewer’s subjectivity is projected. We might imagine such a situation in the gallery: after a longer moment the roar is no longer audible, and water falling from the rocky ledge merges before our eyes. We do not know how long one must endure in the gallery to reach that state, but the moment will certainly arrive sooner or later. Robakowski wants to create an energetic place where, as he probably admitted in conversation with Łukasz Guzek, “a person can go beyond themselves and activate an extraordinary value. We repeatedly release powers that produce a kind of illumination in another person.” The gallery functions as a place where energy is amplified — or more precisely, where Robakowski’s and the viewers’ energy accumulates. Robakowski speaks of the tranquillity attainable by concentrating noise and energy within one place. This is the monotony, he says, experienced by a steelworker who takes a nap amid the thunder of machinery in a mill. In other words, the monotony of the Expressionists, in whom Robakowski has long been interested. And also the monotony that overtakes gallery-goers hungry for novelty.

The Knokke-Heist festival was one of the last great manifestations of the artistic movements of the 1968 generation. Hot love instead of Cold War, narcotic visions and a return to nature; psychedelic rock proliferating and the new spirituality characteristic of the Age of Aquarius flowering beside analytical Conceptual Art. The planned video installation also activates the imagination that so many critics denied Robakowski. Nature, imagination, spirituality — from here it is only one step to the catch-all word “Romanticism”. Is Robakowski becoming Romantic in old age? As he speaks about his intention to show Niagara’s immensity, images pass before our eyes of solitary figures admiring the endless sea from high white cliffs, or museum audiences drinking in views of piled icebergs, the Rocky Mountains and the never-ending Great Plains.

Robakowski wants to show nature without pathos. Bill Viola’s unbearably spectacular art demonstrates how difficult it is to produce “illumination” without falling into kitsch. In Robakowski’s work, no one emerges from behind a wall of water and walks away. Instead of profound symbols and obvious metaphors — human life is like a river… everything flows… — we encounter a metonymy consciously constructed with strictly technical tools. Rather than penetrate existential depths, Robakowski remains on the surface. Niagara’s transfer into the gallery is intended to be indirect, mediated not only by media but above all by art. The gallery, not a viewing platform besieged by tourists, is the more appropriate place for contemplating what Niagara is. Robakowski, a subversively Romantic artist, transforms the gallery into a “forge of nature”, as Maria Janion might have written — he himself calls it an “energetic place”. Niagara’s position on the Canadian-American border would make it easy to situate Robakowski within the context of American nature, but this trail is as misleading as comparing the falling water to Viola’s films. Robakowski undertakes his journey to another continent partly in order to confront a subject once present and important but marginal in Polish art today. In this sense, he is closer to Zygmunt Rytka immersed in a mountain river than to Bill Viola theatrically staging The Raft of the Medusa. Yet American associations are difficult to resist: Robakowski’s energetic art inadvertently recalls Bruce Conner’s powerful A Movie, made exactly half a century earlier.

Returning to the Vistula, nature was banished from Polish art long ago. This was not only the anti-Expressionist, anti-academic and anti-Colourist Conceptual turn of the late 1960s and 1970s. If nature appeared, it had to be Kozłowski’s roses and Jurkiewicz’s sky squeezed from a tube, perhaps also the Panoramic Sea Happening, Kantor’s desperate and comic attempt to subordinate nature. The incantations of the Expressionists and Ciecierski’s and Tarasewicz’s attempts to refresh and air out the “painted landscape” were in vain. If nature, then dead, Colourist and kitsch. It is no accident that Poland is a country where everything that could be copied was copied, with the exception of Land Art. Murak’s and Koziara’s attempts did not help. Perhaps Kozakiewicz will succeed in the reanimation; his position in contemporary art remains threatened, perhaps for precisely this reason: too much nature, too much landscape.

A new era did not flower in mainstream Polish art through Aquarian spirituality and the hippie return to nature. Natalia LL and Pnińska-Bereś operate timidly in this field. Even in Repassage or Hansen, it is difficult to find this subject so natural to art. Perhaps it appears in certain open-air actions, perhaps in Elbląg. Paweł Althamer moulds his art from these organic remnants, fleeing naked into the forest, taking LSD with a professor and embracing trees in a primeval forest outside Warsaw. Perhaps this is why Althamer remains a singular artist. It is difficult to deny that Robakowski also influenced this state of affairs. A “rational mind” — however perverse — combined with a metropolitan lifestyle, an ironic attitude and an Avant-Garde spirit did not encourage the contemplation of nature. The “new media” fetishised by the Workshop artists formed a curtain so impenetrable that, years later, nature expelled through the door has returned through the window.

Today it is difficult to agree with critics such as Busza and Koprowicz, who wrote of Robakowski as a “Positivist”. Twenty years ago, Busza quoted Koprowicz as they jointly celebrated Robakowski’s elimination of “creation”, in opposition to the dominant “Wild Ones”. Concentrating on an “abstracted reality that we may calmly encompass from the heights of empiricism”, they wrote that “Robakowski’s Positivism leaves no room for metaphysics of any kind; the sphere of imagination is completely displaced by the sphere of perception”, in opposition to “church-porch art”.

Today Robakowski reaches a moment of energetic culmination when what was completely repressed — representation, or perhaps imagination — returns. A postmodern contemplative spirituality also awakens, something resembling the spirituality Ronduda attributes to Libera. Robakowski creates a total, immersive “initial image”. Experiencing the sublime in nature is extraordinarily difficult today because of mass tourism and media coverage. How can Niagara be experienced when we know it so well from National Geographic, Voyage and Planète? How can one avoid being carried away by banality? Robakowski therefore seeks a postmodern equivalent for his own inner experience shaped by nature. Today an encounter with the elements is possible only in the gallery, because true power is art.