283 x 100 x 27, 12 x 6 x 5

Rust covering sheet steel, salt, sponge, solidified, dripping magma of paint mixed with plaster, an industrial metal barrel, rustic jute rope, wax, glue, old coat hangers, roofing felt, a birdcage, a 1960s wall cabinet, cardboard, crudely hewn wood, metal cogwheels, chopped-off pencils, a paint-spattered studio sink.

Rough, difficult material, somewhat hostile, irritating in its texture and the shape it has been given. Often regarded as ignoble or even impoverished, it possesses great poetry and conceals accumulated meanings and ambiguous connotations. There is neither glory nor grandeur in the choice of poor material. There is, however, something congenial about it: it can bear an enormous weight of meaning and difficult questions. In art, it is perfectly suited to speaking about hard, in some sense unpleasant, burdensome and repressed things. About those aspects of existence that fill us with fear or disgust and sometimes shock us, while at the same time exerting an irresistible fascination. In using the adjective ‘poor’, I do not mean references to arte povera; I wish to emphasise the deliberate artistic choice of a distinctive object, shape and colour.

We are reluctant to speak about difficult matters, just as we are reluctant to speak about a constant struggle with something—with time, hard work, history, death, illness or devastation. The same is true of the distressing or painful fragments of life that our minds repress. Yet suitable instruments for expressing them may be found in rusty sheet steel, wood or an ‘ugly’ object retrieved even from a rubbish dump.

Artists’ deliberate use of ignoble materials also helps to purge their art of every kind of mythology. It contains no practical, safe or in any sense comfortable elements. Such works neither beautify nor repair the world, and although art likes myths, celebrates them and feeds on them, consistently renewed attempts to demystify those myths are important, even if art can never be cleansed of them completely. Myths, both in art and in reality, restrict freedom, distort consciousness and lead either to false idealisation or to an equally false catastrophism in our perception of the world.

All the works are multidimensional, somewhat analytical, extended in time and, ultimately, powerfully engaging in a certain way, because they compel viewers to form their own attitude towards the outcome of an exhibition or situation.

Using sheet metal or sponge, Mirosław Bałka grapples chiefly with the problem of memory—both his own and collective memory. He creates something akin to installation-mementoes, delving into his biography and finding reminiscences that are not necessarily pleasant. Bałka’s works are spare and cool; their scale and adaptation of space introduce a certain gravity. Through their minimal form and titles—which are nothing more than the dimensions of individual elements—they also say a great deal about the human body inscribed within that form and about a specific person. Bałka’s motionless ‘monuments’ radiate rusty and ashen hues. They are silent and speak at the same time.

Jerzy Bereś wrestled with his sculptural craft. Sculpting is hard work. Hewing great totemic Slavic gods from wood requires considerable physical effort. He did not work his sculptures meticulously or smooth them, but brutally hacked off pieces of wood, retaining a rough, porous surface. These totems were usually among the props in his happenings, in which, naked, he ‘submitted himself’ to the audience’s judgement in the creative act. Above all, Bereś recalled the sculptor’s struggle with matter and, simultaneously, the human condition itself.

Wax, a wooden stool and a joiner’s clamp are the materials Marek Chlanda uses as a sculptor. A mask and a miniature plywood confessional also appear. All parts of the work are positioned appropriately in relation to one another. Something takes place here that might be called a canonical confession or a meditation firmly sustained by faith. There is listening and looking too. In the context of Chlanda’s works, we ask ourselves: What are eyes for? For looking, for seeing. Yet eyes alone are not enough. Consciousness and the mind must be added. Then we not only see but perceive and receive. We look at images (theographic ones) in the most diverse compilations, arrangements and manifestations; we connect them and thereby examine our mind and our consciousness. And then we feel. One can look and see nothing, but one can also look and be moved, shaken, sometimes even illuminated, and remain in that state. The image does not tell us what we are looking at, but how we look. It is an experience of something. The point is not to search for similarities and begin to empathise, because it may also be otherwise. By setting our mind to work at full speed, we conduct a kind of examination, training it and keeping it continually at work throughout life. Hence empty looking and looking that results in seeing. In the presence of Chlanda’s works, we ask ourselves: What should an image representing the soul look like? Is it an image of external life? (If we accept that the soul lies outside the body, we will see its manifold, colourful puzzle pieces in images of external life).

As one might easily imagine, there is a great deal of paint in the studio of the painter Tomasz Ciecierski. There is also a sink in which the artist washes his brushes after work. Paint is ubiquitous: on canvases, brushes, the palette, clothes and the studio floor. As successive painting implements are cleaned, the water in the sink turns a different colour. Tins and their stained lids ‘run riot’ everywhere, while squeezed and partly used tubes with their luscious, colourful contents multiply, covering the entire floor as if in a horror vacui. A traditional painter’s workshop also entails the consequences of tidying up. The task is repeated continually. Almost endlessly. The toil of ‘messing about’ with dyes and pigments may be recorded on photographic paper, even though the final outcome will be a painting. One creative process accompanies another. This says much about painting itself, but also about the painter’s creative process, in which the camera served as a tool documenting the artist’s working practice.

Stanisław Dróżdż’s installation consists of twenty-seven alarm clocks arranged in three rows on the shelves of a wall cabinet. On its bottom shelf, in a plastic container, a twenty-eighth clock has been completely dismantled. In the rows, the artist performed operations on motion; in the columns, on the hands. In the first row the hands move clockwise, in the second they stand still, and in the third they move anticlockwise. In the columns he manipulated the hands: the first column of clocks has ordinary hands, the second has none, the third has hour hands, the fourth minute hands, the fifth has an hour hand in place of a minute hand, and so on, until the combination changes in the ninth column. A great many such manipulations can be performed on clocks. The clocks themselves tell us nothing about the nature of passing time, because they may be set according to one’s own conception. Dróżdż offered us an idea of ‘transcendent uselessness’ existing beyond the concrete and reminding us solely of the inexorable sensation of time passing.

Julian Jończyk, a member of the Nowa Huta Group and the Kraków Group, was interested in matter painting, photography and photomontage, conceptualism, installation, performance and poetry. He used numerous ready-made materials, but is most closely associated with neon tubes. Jończyk’s self-ironic work—a birdcage containing the artist’s surname in neon—combines light with a found object. Here, Jończyk performed a kind of transformation of artistic matter and simultaneously transformed himself, his identity and his artist-self into a luminous sign made of fluorescent letters. Removed from the everyday reality in which we have grown accustomed to it, the neon-object becomes exceptionally intriguing in its meanings. Its function changes. It is framed within something akin to a luminous sign of existence. From a Gnostic perspective, Jończyk thus emphasised the androgynous role of light as well as the mystical and erotic function of the work of art itself.

On 18 January 1969, the group exhibition Winter Emballage, in which Tadeusz Kantor was among the participants, opened at Foksal Gallery. The event was an attempt to mark a pause in the gallery’s exhibition programme. During a happening entitled Typewriter with Sail and Rudder, Kantor typed his own judgements about art without reading them aloud, then placed the pages in a metal tin and soldered it shut. He instructed that the tin should not be opened for fifteen years and titled it Open in 1984. The event at Foksal Gallery was intended to inaugurate so-called impossible art, in which there are no restrictions of space, place or time; the artist described his work as an expansion of imaginary time. Do we need Kantor’s opinion about art today? It is not opinion but art that matters—how it affects us, what it sets in motion within us, and how we cope with the eternal problem of time. Passing time fills us with anxiety, yet on the other hand, like Kantor, we repeatedly arrange returns to the Past for ourselves.

Everyone copes with their own life as best they can. Edward Krasiński lived and worked somewhat tongue in cheek. He transformed his illness into artistic absurdity, a kind of conceptual joke. He did not seek out beautiful objects but contented himself with ordinary, banal things, such as a length of rope. Using a steel rod, he shaped it into an amusing flourish. The object’s finishing touch was a knot tied at one end of the rope and dipped in red paint. That is all—and so much, because the final effect is surprising; it may amuse and make us laugh, but undeniably intrigues and awakens our unforced curiosity. A piece of simple rope may not be pretty; it may even be ugly and poor, but does that matter when it has assumed the form of a highly original sign?

What else can be done with a traditional painting support? With an ordinary, smooth canvas stretched over a wooden frame? What new idea can be devised when it seems that everything has already been tried in this medium? Andrzej Pawłowski decided to experiment with it according to his own conception. In the early 1960s, as if testing how far the material could be stretched within a wooden frame and the effect of pushing out the canvas from the reverse with wooden slats, he created a series of grey laminated canvases known as Naturally Shaped Forms (Naturally Shaped Surfaces Conditioned by Light), which pass from the realm of painting into sculpture. Pawłowski’s painting-sculptures resemble a peculiar tissue or skin stretched in different directions, over which light falls in intriguing ways. He commented on his experiments: ‘By changing the length or suspension points, we determine the shape of the curve; nevertheless, it will always form according to the laws of physics, which I take the liberty of calling natural. In this case too, every change in shape will be accompanied by s e l f-c o r r e c t i o n, making it perfect each time. If we assume that the person directing these changes recognises the principle of such a logic of form, while the instructions arise from that person’s subjective need, then we will be able to call this shape a n a t u r a l l y s h a p e d f o r m.’

In the early 1960s, during her first journeys to Italy, Teresa Rudowicz began making unique, sentimental collages. She combined paint on canvas with ready-made objects, usually found at flea markets. She used assorted types of paper and cardboard, old newspapers and posters, fabrics, old photographs bearing someone’s history and past, stamps and postcards, fragments of old manuscripts or handwritten documents bought from Italian antiquarians in Piazza Fontanella Borghese in Rome.

She glued old-fashioned lace, jewellery, plaster mouldings and even haberdashery items to her paintings. All these treasures enabled her to create the collage’s distinctive atmosphere: paintings-journeys into an intimate past known only to her. These splinters of memory always harmonised with a restricted, deliberately faded-looking range of colours dominated by ochres and browns, shades usually associated with old objects. Like no one else, she could combine paint and ready-made objects into a harmonious whole, taking us back into the past and her private archaeology.

The interdisciplinary artist Mikołaj Smoczyński devoted his entire life to contemplating time, its passage, and the destruction of painting and building materials or objects. Past time was the point of reference in his art. He recorded states of changing reality within the same room, observing the texture of the floor, the shape of water and the form of dust on floorboards, and preserved it all in photographs, documenting the changing reality of a place—private because it was his own studio—presented in many manifestations. He actively intervened in existing spaces, working by a site-specific method, and dismantled the interiors in which he realised his spatially extensive projects. Determining experiences—for example, deconstructing parts of the floor in his studio and assembling its displaced elements in a new form in an entirely different place, or gluing canvases to gallery walls and then tearing them away together with layers of old paint and plaster—were a way of revealing the reverse of reality, belonging only to a particular space. He used a cheap construction material called suprema, a cement-bonded wood-wool board. Smoczyński’s para-architectural constructions made from scaffolding or asbestos cement transformed interiors and created new, hostile and gloomy spaces. In the final years of his career, his work featured burnt-out light bulbs, limes splashed with whitewash and wooden coat hangers which, in assorted variations, formed abstract circular arrangements enclosed by rectangular boxes made of plywood and timber.

Connected with the Orthodox tradition of icon painting, Andrzej Szewczyk used his art to remind us that every biography contains a private and social tragedy. He also spoke of death as an inseparable constituent of every life. A sensitive erudite, he began with painting but later attempted to neutralise it. For this purpose, he used fragments of coloured crayons and pencils, pistachio shells, envelopes from letters already read, poisonous lead or wax. From them he created series of tablets, volumes, libraries and rows of tombstones, heavily saturated with a sense of fear and paralysing sorrow. Like an icon painter, he invented a new kind of coded script, replacing letters with lead stamps, cut pencils and patterns made by an old decorating roller. He was consumed by the idea of his GREAT WRITING, which was not merely an idea but also his life. His manual work, in the form of cycles of ever-changing works, was identical with intellectual work and with writing surprising letters and reflections sent to friends, artists and curators. For Szewczyk, writing, painting, correspondence, thinking, contemplation and even silence were equally valid manifestations of his occupation, markers of his ethereal yet concrete, often unsettling epistolography. There is no humour or jest in it. There is, however, a poetry of sorrow, for, as he wrote: ‘The poetry of lead. The simple beauty of fear. The simple beauty of DREAD, SORROW. Lead is poison. In my memory it is always associated with death. With what is dead not only in the sense of being incapable of further transformation (physics), but dead in human terms: killed, poisoned, hounded to death…’.

Why must autonomous reality be cruel and disquieting? Death, illness or disability—catastrophe as a certain possibility, perhaps even as a potentiality or active force. Whether we wish it or not, we are entangled in it and left at its mercy, just as it is left at ours. There is no summoning of spirits then, nor are references to anything being created. The point is to find or produce a specific corporeality: different, uncomfortable, expressing this catastrophic force, this erosion or annihilation of the soul. In his work, Grzegorz Sztwiertnia touches on the question of disability. For him it is not an awkward issue but an entirely human and present manifestation. He makes visible what we fear without reason: anomalies of every kind, deformities, disease, infected or dead tissue. Through unexpected combinations of alienated objects such as cogwheels and steel tubes, he problematises the ‘clichés’ accepted unreflectively, compelling us to break with schematic thinking when confronted with something seemingly familiar, such as human illness and impairment.

When I look anew at all the works selected for the exhibition—as disquieting as they are beautiful—I have the impression of being transported into a world that is not only piercingly cold but sad and grave at once, as if marked by the phantoms of those once alive. And not because many of their makers have died. Most of the works resemble a desperate journey, a tragic wandering accompanied by mourning for a lost reality, for what was once real and now undeniably belongs to the past. These are sad experiences, but convincingly moving ones too, because they open before me the infinitely capacious space of memory. As I absorb its character, colour and distinctive poetics, I feel that the connotations of history, place or specific individuals are not the only important things here. The works in the exhibition evoke many issues and set many new paths of thought and meanings in motion, not only those which, under a certain pressure of association, lead directly to particular threads in the experience of life. Far more valuable and interesting is the very experience of this journey into the space of memory, the solitude that accompanies it and, above all, the effort, weariness and struggle that are inseparable elements of every journey burdened by personal anxieties carried within.

All this makes us reflect on the fate of a human being journeying through time and space—an individual, an artist, a pilgrim.

*Andrzej Szczepaniak, curator and art historian. Lives and works in Kraków.