Discussion

Jacek Michalak: I would like to extend a very warm welcome to Monika Małkowska of “Rzeczpospolita”, Sylwia Borowska of “Gala”, Marzena Bomanowska of “Gazeta Wyborcza”, Magda Olczyk of TVP, Krzysztof Jurecki of the Museum of Art, Dr Kazimierz Piotrowski, affiliated with the Warsaw School of Humanities, and Dr Krzysztof Cichoń, affiliated with the University of Łódź and Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. I welcome our dear Master, Zbigniew Libera, author of the series Masters and Positives, on display at Atlas Sztuki from today. I would like to begin our discussion of Zbigniew Libera's work by referring to what I consider an interesting article, The Art of Pretending to Be Art, written by Monika Małkowska, who is here at the table with us, and published in the 7–8 February issue of “Plus i Minus”, a supplement to “Rzeczpospolita”. The article is particularly interesting in relation to the Masters series. Is genuine value in art truly able to make its way onto the market? Zbyszek, my first question is for you.

Krzysztof Cichoń: Do you really want to make your way onto the market? Do you produce anything for the market at all, and if so, for which market?

Zbigniew Libera: No, I do not produce anything for the market. As you can see, the exhibition occupies two rooms. These are two different works. One of them is situated in such a thoroughly Polish context that it would be difficult to speak of a market in any broader sense. Unless we begin to understand the market as a place where more happens than simply selling. I meant the market—the market of ideas—in the broader sense of the word. Why is it that the people sitting here are journalists, art critics and journalists? Because the subject… as you can see for yourselves, is the press. In one room we have press photographs, while in the other we have press articles. We have simply reached a point in our country—and not only in our country—where the press has become the body that regulates precisely these market questions in art. The press promotes somebody; the press declares that something is good…

Monika Małkowska: Let us say the media; television has a stronger influence…

ZL: Yes, the media, but the press has something different: it is on paper, it is permanent—writing, print, force. It can be kept in an archive and shown off later. In any case, the media have begun to decide what is good in art and what is not. One might try to reassess why this has happened. On the one hand, there are institutions established for precisely this purpose, but they are state institutions and, while they once conducted research into art and art history and built collections, they now do practically none of that. There are no longer any authorities on art across the broader social spectrum. The press has taken over that role. I am going directly to the press and playing this game. Of course, who knows, perhaps I am naive, but perhaps somebody will notice this work, notice these artists and actually take an interest in them—although I know that Kazimierz Piotrowski has already studied them and knows a great deal about them. But more is needed: publications about these artists, at least some place that would collect this art, because it is entirely absent from collections in Poland. It was extremely difficult even to persuade Director Dąbrowski to stage an exhibition of Partum at Ujazdowski Castle. If an artist can be measured by their influence on art—by their real influence on the art we have today, though perhaps it was more visible in the 1990s—then Świdziński, Kulik, Partum, Kryszkowski and Wiśniewski undoubtedly had that influence, rather than Kantor, Abakanowicz or other artists whom we might assume did so after visiting a museum or reading a book about the history of art in Poland. I should perhaps also warn against going too far in portraying me as an activist on behalf of these artists. I am involved, of course, and so on and so forth… but preceding that involvement, as it were, is a desire to use the world of the media and newspapers, and also to have an artist do something directly in newspapers. If we recall the Positives series, amid which we are now sitting, it is already a kind of public art, occupying a certain territory of public communication through the media and the press. So that aspect matters as well, and I simply wanted to work with the press too. And since it so fortunately happened that I was able to discover something of artistic value, I am delighted to have discovered it, because it is of very high quality, is worth discovering, and shows that there are still things to be discovered. So…

KC: If I understand correctly, you decided to become a teacher and educate society.

ZL: No, I did not decide to become a teacher, heaven forbid. Quite simply, if I wanted to work with the press as a medium, if the press decides what is important in art, and if there are no institutions capable of doing this for me, then in a final act of desperation I do it myself. I am thinking of myself as well, because in my view my importance in art depends on having precursors and then successors who will remain after me; one cannot become so isolated.

JM: Yes, but by showing the Masters series you are, in a sense, seeking to create a new quality in art history, are you not?

Sylwia Borowska: Is this your history of art?

ZL: That too. I could always explain myself by saying—as I have said several times already—that these are my masters, my history of art, although I think this is something more than my history of art and my masters. Of course, as Kazimierz Piotrowski rightly notes in his text, there is also a play here on the idea of masters, because these masters are anti-masters: they are not suited to being masters but rather anti-masters. In that sense, they are my masters. I think there are more such references, but let us leave that aside for now.

KC: It seems that a positive Libera is beginning. Until now you have been associated with critical art; criticism has lost its meaning, there is no longer anything to criticise, and you have set about creating your own history, a very positive one. Is this a new stage in Polish art?

ZL: As Kazimierz Piotrowski rightly observed, there is a certain charientism, as he calls it, a kind of artificial falseness that complicates this positive art; it is a positivity that…

KC: …is not entirely positive, but ambiguous. Yet you use the media, observe the role of the media and so forth; on the other hand, considering everything that has appeared about your exhibition in the last few days—my God, Tadeusz Kantor did not receive press like this even in his best years. You yourself are so extraordinarily entangled in this comeback of yours: who is playing with whom here? Congratulations on your return, but…

ZL: You see, given that the press is already here and we are collaborating with it, I think it has been somewhat successful. I am surprised: it has been quite a successful collaboration. I think, for example, that it is a pity Ms Jarecka is not here, because “Duży Format” is simply the seventh work in the Masters series, except that it now exists in reality. I am happy to include it in the project because it lends credibility to the other works in the series. “Duży Format” printed a cover of the “Gazeta Wyborcza” magazine featuring Jan Świdziński, and in the issue with Partum on the cover it all becomes more real. Already… I am beginning to lose track of what is real and what is not. Perhaps someone will notice that we cannot grasp the original, that there is no original at all, and that we are continually witnessing only a certain process: how information, on the one hand, and images, on the other, take shape on newspaper pages and become intertwined with those existing in reality. We merely see a process, a fragment of a process.

MM: Let us return to the media. It is enough for someone to appear on television for half a minute, and in terms of mass social reception that has a stronger effect than a text which, you are right, is archived…

ZL: Let me interrupt: this is not about the so-called mass audience. I would not concern myself with it in that way, because probably no artist has the ambition to reach a mass audience. What has happened is that even within a narrower, elite circle there are no specialist journals. The press decides where each person is placed within art.

MM: I must admit that I read your interview with Zofia Kulik with great pleasure. It is excellent; it could absolutely be held up as a model of an engaging, very good interview—chapeau bas.

ZL: Let me say a few words about that. We obviously had to consider which magazines these should be and what kind of articles. The point was also to present these artists in the way authorities are presented. We all know that even when we leaf through a magazine for the first time, without reading it, merely looking at the pictures and reading the standfirsts, we already know who is an authority. It is also a matter of how the photographs are taken and how the works are presented. I had in mind a kind of magazine that does not in fact exist in Poland, nor did any equivalent exist in the 1990s. That is why I created “Na dworze”. I was looking for a magazine, preferably French, because in France today those glossy, illustrated magazines feature sportspeople, singers and, above all, politicians, but artists appear too. It is curious that a person such as Cioran, an impoverished philosopher, can suddenly receive a huge article with photographs and so on. That is one thing. The other is that Zofia Kulik, as someone who had in some way been accepted, could serve as a guide to those artists who had not. Notice, too, that Zofia says a great deal about those times and hints at certain things that might have been awkward to say in other interviews. Thus, the interviews also have a formal purpose within the series as a whole: they are made in such a way that they correspond with and supplement one another. Certain names recur throughout all these texts. A circle begins to emerge, one that an inquisitive art historian might explore.

SB: Is all of this intended, as it were, to charge the world represented in the commercial press?

ZL: Perhaps I will use my notes and we can try to put this all in some order. These are two different works: Masters and Positives. I can read out some of the more important points concerning the works and their ideas. As regards Masters, let me read five points about the idea—what it is and why. First, there is the issue of the press's influence on art and on the presentation of art, although this now extends beyond presentation itself to what will be recognised as art, what will survive in museums, for example, and what will enter history. An artist who does not appear in the press may never appear there in the future. Being in the press, even brushing against it, has become a kind of licence. That is how things are now. This is one subject. Another is the question of an alternative history of art. We have already spoken a little about the artist who, in a sense, acts as a historian and also conducts research. My role in all this was in fact to gather material about all these artists, carry out research and find suitable people who could collaborate with me as writers. Since I am on the subject, I shall explain how it worked. On one side was an art historian, and on the other were journalists. What immediately strikes everyone is that, on the one hand, we have the ponderous language of art historians, virtually unsuitable for writing—as Dorota Jarecka noted in today's “Gazeta Wyborcza” review of the exhibition—and, on the other, a journalistic superficiality as flat as the paper itself. One can hardly blame either side. I devised a way of reconciling them. I created an editorial team: texts already written by an art critic—Kazimierz Piotrowski in most cases—were then edited by me and by the journalists working with me, Marcel Andino Velez and Bogna Świątkowska. On average, the texts emerged after about the fifth revision. It was an extremely labour-intensive and lengthy process. Then there is the contextual issue. I think I write somewhere that I am effectively a local last Mohican of this kind of art—contextual art. It seems to me that this art has a great future before it, that it is highly relevant and still full of potential, particularly in an age of globalisation, because by definition it relates to context. My work does too. It is difficult to imagine it being shown somewhere in England or America; there is an untranslatability here as well. Finally, there is the question of how we might imagine collaboration or artistic patronage today, or cooperation between an artist and a patron. The traditional view is that there is a patron and an artist: the patron buys the painting, or in a slightly modified arrangement gives the artist money for canvas and easels, and the artist paints. Sometimes it turns out that the present requires something more. It seems to me that the example of the three boards here—those of “Duży Format” and “Przekrój”, and indeed the earlier “Przekrój”—may be a good way of showing how collaboration might work: how an artist could collaborate with someone who makes the work possible. It is less a matter of patronage than of cooperation. An artist can use certain technical means provided by somebody else for that person's own purposes. I think this is very positive. Perhaps someone will choose to develop it. It must also be said that, in relation to Masters, an important aspect of this patronage is that articles of this kind naturally appear alongside advertisements. And I too had to become an advertisement. At one point I realised that I had something I could offer for sale. As you can see, many of these advertisements resemble humanitarian campaigns, but several were simply purchased.

Marzena Bomanowska: Excuse me, at the normal advertising rates?

ZL: Yes, converted appropriately. An entire group—a unit, let us say—of experts was created to handle this and sell the advertisements. That is interesting too. The offer speaks not of selling advertising space but of co-creating a work of art. It shows that one could envisage similar ideas, even quite large exhibitions, being financed in this way.

SB: How did your collaboration develop? That is interesting. Please tell us what went on behind the scenes in the negotiations with advertisers.

ZL: It is a very long story, because it took about six months: writing the offer, sending it to various people, identifying certain companies and excluding others, and so on. That is a separate subject. I do not want it to take up too much time.

SB: Was that itself an element of your artistic exploration—the process too?

ZL: It made me realise a great many things. A marketing proposal—and reading such a proposal—is very interesting for an artist, because it allows them to see their ideas translated into another language. But let us leave that for a moment. Those were questions concerning Masters, whereas Positives is something rather different. I shall begin with the range of ideas I use here: these are afterimages of memory. The entire Positives work is based on the device, or principle, of memory afterimages. Strzemiński wrote about afterimages, which is very interesting; he attached enormous importance to them and so forth. It turns out that contemporary research into vision confirms what Strzemiński said, and one might say that I create such afterimages. That is, I look at something and it reminds me of something else. That is essentially the whole work. Either one has something in one's store of memories or one does not. The next issue, a psychological one, is that images evolve just as biological matter does; they undergo a process of evolution. They mutate, they change a little—there are various processes at work. Another question concerns the press photograph as a source of information about reality: we have come to doubt everything, and every form of media communication has been challenged, yet we believe press photography. That is why I chose it. The problem addressed by this work is precisely that of process. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that what I observe—these mutations—are processes, not individual works encountered along the way, but particular stages held still. This is not something that exists as an eternal work. We always see it at some stage of the process.

Krzysztof Jurecki: Looking at Zbigniew Libera's artistic development, we should begin with the fact that in the 1980s he made outstanding film works which entered several museum collections. In the 1990s he made works that were widely discussed and could be called representative—or, in my view, even the most outstanding works—of critical art. Now we have a new stage in his development. I would draw your attention to the fact that this is not an accidental artist, someone who appears like a star and then vanishes. He was already there in the 1980s and 1990s, and now we are in a new century. He does not exhibit often; for a certain period he may even have been better known abroad, where publications appeared and his works were discussed, among other places, in “Art in America”. Somehow this went unnoticed in Poland. Zbigniew Libera then reappeared in connection with his decision to withdraw from the 1997 Venice Biennale. I think few artists would have chosen to withdraw from participation in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and I value his courage. I also remember that he was able to withdraw from the exhibition The Dungeons of Manhattan in Łódź in 1988 because the exhibition had two faces, so to speak: an official, representative art scene, with artists continuing media art, conceptualism and so forth, and an inferior group of artists invited only to attend a meeting. Zbigniew Libera was one of the few artists who had the courage to withdraw, even though he understood that this was a very important event, one of the most important art exhibitions of the late 1980s. This is, one might say, my brief account of the artist's development and artistic courage, because courage is a rare quality. Looking at the two series, Masters and Positives, I must honestly say that, for many reasons, I find Positives decidedly more convincing and Masters less so, for various reasons. There is certainly room for a discussion here. Monika Małkowska noted that Zofia Kulik has been a well-known and recognised artist since the late 1980s, and from that point onward hers has been a phenomenal artistic career, with numerous exhibitions and recognition everywhere. I have great respect for Partum, for example, but exhibitions devoted to him were held after his death: one at Kordegarda and another at Galeria Wschodnia in Łódź. The problem with Partum is that, regrettably, nobody recorded his appearances. He was someone who operated in real situations, during actual meetings, and technical circumstances meant that… It is similar, for example, to the case of Tristan Tzara, who appears in many publications as an outstanding Dadaist, although I personally have never seen his works. There are, of course, people and artists who realise themselves in other mental spaces. They simply do not produce works, even as a matter of principle, and so those works do not exist. I agree, of course, that Partum had an enormous influence on the alternative artistic community in Łódź and Warsaw and is unjustly omitted from many presentations. Of all your masters, however, the one who surprised me most was Jan Świdziński, an artist who remains active today. What matters in Jan Świdziński's case is the theory of art, or rather a new attempt to interpret the work of art. Among similar views on contextualism one could mention Zbigniew Dłubak or Jan Białostocki, who wrote that art depends on its artistic context. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that Jan Świdziński is a very interesting personality as an art theorist, whereas as an artist he did not create—and this nevertheless matters in artistic practice—convincing works of art. We can, of course, agree to call it contextualism and a new formula of conceptualism. Let us recall the recent exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Conceptual Experiences, in which you also took part: Jan Świdziński was not there. There was also an alternative exhibition, or counter-exhibition, at BWA in Lublin, and Jan Świdziński did appear there. But I have seen several of Świdziński's solo exhibitions, and I know that Kazimierz Piotrowski has written very important texts about him. He certainly enlivened the artistic community, but as an artist he did not create anything that would give him a chance—I may, of course, be wrong—of surviving in the history of Polish art. He will survive as a theorist. He will survive as the initiator of contextual art. Such exhibitions did take place. There was a current of contextual art in the second half of the 1970s, but very little of it truly remains. Certain artistic ideas cannot be translated into artistic matter, and it seems to me that this is the case with Jan Świdziński. Anastazy Wiśniewski is, of course, present in art history. His problem would be of a different kind: he seems to have exhausted himself too quickly. The man is alive, has somewhere to live, shows something very rarely, and I think that in this instance the fault does not lie with the media or art criticism; he simply seems to have nothing to communicate.

ZL: I disagree. I think that if you read the articles in the catalogue of my exhibition, you would change your mind. I hope you will change your mind when you read them. It is not as you say. First, these artists did leave material traces. There is a great deal that could be collected. What you have said gives a rough picture of how this period in art history is viewed by precisely the sort of art historian who works in a museum. What I am saying is that you have failed to appreciate and notice the importance these artists had. There are no studies of this art and nobody has documented it. Art may be ephemeral, but it can be documented: its fragments can be assembled; we can establish what was done, where, by whom and when; somebody can study it.

KJ: That has been done in Partum's case, I would say. There is Truszkowski's book.

ZL: Partum was fortunate that someone like Truszkowski wrote about him at all. These things have not been researched, catalogued or collected, and in fact nobody even recognised what they were at the time. In the 1980s, the country had already begun to atrophy. People simply ceased to process this material and produced nothing; they did not understand what it was, that this was the art we had, what its significance was, and so forth. Consider an extraordinarily curious fact: artists at the Foksal Gallery such as Althamer and Bodzianowski—what kind of art do they really make? The kind made by Anastazy Wiśniewski or Partum. Yet it was the Foksal Gallery that labelled the earlier artists a pseudo-avant-garde. Strangely enough, by a kind of osmosis the gallery did not raise successors to Gierowski, Gostomski and Kantor, but successors to Partum and Wiśniewski.

KJ: That is true. It certainly is.

ZL: But I do not see this in art history, because that history simply does not exist. There are no art journals we would regard as authoritative and heed accordingly. There is no book or album, for example, that would discuss Polish art from the perspective of the Third Republic. The last such book dates from the Polish People's Republic. In the past, people wrote books on Polish painting or Polish art, but none of these matters has been reassessed since then. We risk losing these artists and seeing them erased from the face of the earth altogether.

KJ: But Zofia Kulik's work seems to contradict that model, since she has been accepted by everyone. In Partum's case, I think we can all agree that he was a very interesting and outstanding artist with enormous influence.

KC: We do not all agree. I do not think it is so obvious. It is a question of criteria. These people are simply your acquaintances, Mr Zbigniew, which is very nice, but it is slightly reminiscent of the political practice known as TKM. The question concerns the criterion of selection: why these people and not others?

ZL: They are the ones precisely because, if you read all these articles…

JM: Everyone has read them, Mr Zbyszek. I delivered the catalogues to everyone several days ago. Everyone received your text and all the other materials two weeks ago.

ZL: They are all connected by something. I shall say more: the place, time and reach of what can be read in those articles suggest it, as it were.

KJ: But Krzysztof, tell us what it is that you fail to appreciate in Partum, for example.

KC: One can quite calmly look at Partum as a grumbling Danish pensioner. With all due respect, very little follows from it. So this is a matter of criteria, because I have an increasingly strong sense that I am participating in a highly efficient marketing or public-relations venture. You gentlemen keep saying “artist”, “art” and so forth, but perhaps you will become a new media shark and promote your friends, those you consider masters. You have every right to do so. But where are the boundaries of all this? Are we still dealing with art, and does it mean anything any longer? You see, repeating certain gestures made by these artists is extraordinarily easy. I congratulate you on your enterprise. I congratulate you on a certain shrewdness and on the marketing, but is it still…

ZL: You are insinuating something that I do not recognise in myself. Both the shrewdness I do not possess and the marketing I do not practise play a very important role in this project. After all, this is what we do in daily life: we buy something, sell something and so forth. This supposed shrewdness and this marketing are simply formal elements placed on display.

KC: Yes. They are the tools; they are necessary to the production. How does this differ from many other attempts to attract attention and promote someone unknown? How is it different? Is there something that distinguishes art and what is important from what is unimportant? Or is there simply no difference? Without denying anybody the right to make such attempts…

ZL: You see, Jan Świdziński, for example, wrote a great deal about what is and is not art, and when.

KC: This contextualism is taken so far that…

ZL: I could say that art is whatever an artist calls art. That is what distinguishes it from what an artist does not call art. But I am an artist working after Jan Świdziński, who criticised that position, so I will put it this way: you may question it, of course, but we are sitting in a place that is a gallery, and we have come here to see an art exhibition. All these newspapers have written about me as an artist, so this is already art.

KC: So we are convinced by something external: the place, the institution?

ZL: Let us agree that it is art. We all agree on that. There is a certain social consensus that what we are discussing is art. So this is what it looks like.

MM: I would like to return to my assessment of the situation. Why is Zosia Kulik the person who is written and spoken about? Because her activity is genuinely important and because she works. She works constantly. Her influence is much broader than Partum's activity within his own circle, let alone that of Jan Świdziński, who in my view is a compiler. We can speak of contextual art in more or less every instance of interesting art up to the 1990s. Can your art be described as contextual? Certainly. Can Zosia Kulik's art be described as contextual? Certainly. But nomenclature and naming do not yet constitute a theory. Nor do they constitute an artistic achievement. They are simply intelligence: the ability to observe and to draw upon what one sees, observes and records. That is all. As I said, Partum was active within his own milieu, as was said of Przyjemski and Anastazy Wiśniewski. The boys have fallen silent, evidently because they have nothing to say. Let them box and jostle with those who now work in a similar or analogous way, or are perhaps their heirs. Besides, if they have nothing to say now, then either they have grown thin, their talent has diminished, or they simply cannot cope with this context. They were good under socialism, but now… I also wanted to offer my congratulations, because I consider your idea of entering the media genuinely brilliant. The mystification you carried out is an unqualified success in every respect. It is extremely funny and clever, and both refers us to the past and confronts us, here and now, with your works—the works among which we are sitting, the Positives. These photographs genuinely provoke thought. I already knew some of them; some had been published, and the work involving the so-called camps had been exhibited several times. I greatly admired the way you staged situations that refer to something but are ironic or mocking, and genuinely overturned various taboos. We here are certainly aware of that. I do not know whether the average visitor will understand what they refer to, but that is a matter for each viewer.

ZL: Memory is greater than it seems.

MM: That is precisely what I wanted to say about memory afterimages. Afterimage memory—perhaps not under that name—has functioned in psychology for a long time. It is certainly not contemporary; it has existed for several decades, if not more, and has been known since the 1940s, I think, or perhaps earlier. It is also used as an advertising device, so you return to what you said: in employing advertising methods, you may also be deliberately evoking afterimage memory. That is how advertisements work. Something broadcast on television for a fraction of a second was not registered by the eye but was registered by the memory. We are made in such a way that sometimes the eye lets something pass; it seems we have not noticed it, but our memory has recorded it. Our memory is far more voracious than our sight. I therefore consider this part, the Positives, a genuinely excellent and thought-provoking work in every respect: it compels reflection and is extremely intelligent at the same time. The Masters part is not entirely clear to me. Of course, you were entitled to select this group of artists, and I have no objection to that. But Zofia Kulik is someone I respect absolutely and who does not need to be invoked, recalled or dug up. She is, however, a titan of work.

ZL: Since we have returned to this subject, I must disagree. I continue to regard these articles as necessary, and I hope that people come because perhaps someone will want to look further. Świdziński has written eight books, none of which has ever been published in Poland, although they appeared in Canada, the United States, Sweden, France and the Netherlands. We do not know them. It is difficult to talk about them precisely because we have not read them: nobody translated them. Świdziński caused a considerable stir in 1976, and not a local one. A conference in Canada was organised largely around him. Joseph Kosuth himself attended those conferences, because Świdziński had in fact succeeded, as it were, in bringing conceptual art to a halt. Kosuth accepted those arguments and moved to Świdziński's side. In the art world of the time, he was the only recognisable figure from Eastern Europe. He is a serious man who accomplished serious things. But we simply disregarded him and did not translate him. Not a single small book has ever appeared to bring all this together, nor has one appeared about Partum to present his poetry and what he wrote and published. That is my only complaint. When the people who still remember these artists die, nothing will remain. It is a pity that Iza Kowalczyk is not here, because her book is an extraordinary sign of this severed memory. She writes about body art and critical art but places it entirely incorrectly on the timeline.

MM: This also applies to what you are saying and what you do, although in your case you leave it implicit. An artist who chooses one form of activity rather than another—something ephemeral, with a directly Dadaist and conceptual genealogy, I would say—must accept that they are working for a particular audience and that the work will pass away. Since the artist chooses it… notice that nobody forces them to adopt one convention rather than another. By choosing that particular form of activity, they also assume that it will pass. On the one hand, documenting it may be a task for an art historian, if they feel called to do so; on the other, nobody may document it. That too is a possibility. The artist must take it into account, because it is inherent in such a choice of form.

ZL: In any case, every artist must assume that nobody will take an interest in them. But when an artist plays an important role and influences what art looks like for the next fifteen or twenty years, one might expect their activity to be documented.

MM: Why, if there is no information about it, for example? If an artist does not announce that they are going to perform somewhere, how can that performance be documented?

KJ: In Świdziński's case, one should expect something from the bodies that promoted him for years. Those included BWA in Lublin and Andrzej Mroczek. They should have published catalogues for him, since Mroczek presented his artist every two years. That is the circle to which you or Świdziński should address any complaints.

ZL: You would like Mroczek to present Świdziński. I would like the Centre for Contemporary Art to do so, because to me Świdziński's art and his stance merit, for example, a conference organised by the National Museum, the Centre for Contemporary Art or Zachęta, with various people contributing so that society could learn what he did. You know perfectly well that the problem is rather larger than that, and that Mroczek publishing a book about Świdziński would not solve it. It is simply a matter of the damned short memory of the people sitting here when it comes to their own art.

MM: I once asked Świdziński about his choices and so forth. One might say it was a provocative statement, but he claimed to be so manually inept that he painted his last picture when he had to do so to pass a course. There is obviously nothing wrong with his having taken up something else. The only problem is that I cannot recall him offering any strong intellectual explanation for it either. You mentioned the Foksal Gallery choosing some people rather than others. One might say…

ZL: No, that is not what happened. In 1975 Wiesio Borowski wrote a text entitled Pseudo-Avant-Garde. It was a kind of denunciation in which he said that these artists were harmful to culture.

KC: In that text Wiesław Borowski cited a literal plagiarism from Kantor's French catalogue, which nobody here has mentioned. I would like to ask you, and Kazimierz Piotrowski as the author of the text for this exhibition, what Wiesław Borowski did to you. It looks like a struggle, revenge after many years, a bloody vendetta. Wiesław Borowski has become the great absentee from this exhibition. What did he do? He wrote a text which could indeed have caused harm in 1975…

JM: I wanted to invite Wiesław Borowski to our meeting, but Mr Zbyszek Libera objected to my sending him an invitation.

KC: What did he do that makes you want to change art history now?

ZL: When one writes a novel or a story, or wants to say anything at all, one needs certain figures to employ. One element of this story is therefore the naming—or labelling as pseudo-avant-garde—of the artists who interest me. Wiesio Borowski did that at a particular moment; that is his only part in it. He is a figure who helps to present these artists.

KC: This concerns footnote fifteen to Dr Piotrowski's text in the catalogue of the present exhibition. Kazimierz, it is a somewhat hagiographic footnote. Writing about your exhibition Irreligion and the martyrdom you suffered at the National Museum in Warsaw as a result, you also named Wiesław Borowski as one of the exhibition's critics. I do not dispute that, but it rather weakens the force of the events of 1975, because the footnote reveals that Wiesław Borowski was again involved in a conflict that took place recently.

ZL: Borowski is now beyond any conflict; he has effectively retired. At most, he is a figure in history who did something and said something, which I used to present my own history…

KP: Zbyszek is saying what I would like to say. Some people, however, are saying things that increasingly irritate me, because I thought that if one writes such a long text and gives people a reasonably well-organised account, they can learn from it. I can see that this effect has not been overused here. First of all, we have no idea what criteria ought to be discussed in relation to work such as Świdziński's, Partum's, the early work of Zofia Kulik or that of Przemysław Kwiek. We have heard judgements from Ms Małkowska and the statement that Zofia Kulik is hardworking. What, then, would have happened to Zofia Kulik if she had continued to work today as she did in the 1970s, if she had not changed that convention under the influence of her return to matter, to objects and to sculpture? Our media and our art history would probably have forgotten her. She would have found it difficult to emerge, because unfortunately our art history, our museums and our art criticism lag far behind the development of reflection on art and on what art is. They are underdeveloped and simply uneducated. This happens all the time. In the 1970s, and especially in 1975, when this mode of creation intensified and new forms of activity appeared, this kind of institutional criticism, attached to the object—to a particular kind of object—could not cope and denounced this kind of art. Wiesław Borowski published Pseudo-Avant-Garde in the socialist periodical “Kultura”. The text begins: “The native artistic pseudo-avant-garde…” and then, listen to what he writes: “whose unpunished expansion”. This is an art critic writing in the mid-1970s in such language: “whose unpunished expansion”. Later he writes of “complete impunity” and a reprehensible lack of a critical filter. It is an attack on art criticism, on Mroczek and on Galeria Współczesna. He goes on to say that the pseudo-avant-garde is a dangerous phenomenon for Polish culture, and names artists such as Warpechowski, Robakowski, Partum and Dłubak.

JM: Kazimierz, it is 2004 and we are in a private gallery…

KP: The point is that at a certain moment Polish criticism—Polish art criticism—failed to understand or encompass certain things, and this has continued from one generation to the next. When a book such as Piotr Piotrowski's The Decade appears and repeats the same stupid attack by Wiesław Borowski, writes the same nonsense, reproduces it and instils it in students, how can we understand what later happens in art history? What happened in the 1990s, ladies and gentlemen, is that you now applaud these works by the top artist sitting here, Zbigniew Libera, who emerged from precisely that milieu, while forgetting where they came from and the roots from which they grew. Where did he learn? He did not learn it in a museum, at an academy of fine arts or at Foksal. Today Libera tells us where he learnt. If you value his works and value him, you must believe him when he says that artists such as Świdziński and Partum existed, and that artists such as Anastazy Wiśniewski existed. That was his university. The point is that art cannot be viewed in such a simple and trivial way.

KC: It can.

KP: It cannot. Of course it can, but the point is that here we are discussing and arguing about values and about how things ought to be.

KJ: If this were such an important experience within conceptualism and contextualism—there was the famous conference in Denmark and there are photographs from that time—why are there no works by Jan Świdziński at the Centre Pompidou, MoMA and so forth, if it was all so brilliant? We might say that his absence from Polish museums was our mistake. But let us remember that there is no single mechanism in art that decides these things.

Marek Janiak: I want to ask Zbyszek Libera one question, as a journalist. Leaving aside the conflict between journalists and the art world, when I look at the works in the Masters series I see a stance connected with late conceptual and post-conceptual art. That art—and indeed the entire organisational sphere surrounding it—was characterised by one extraordinarily important quality: the whole system of art possessed immense self-awareness. In other words, artists were simultaneously historians and theorists of the art they practised. An art theorist and art historian who is also an artist differs in one respect from an art historian and theorist who is not an artist: risk. The artist as art historian launches concepts for the first time, saying, “This is how it is. I believe this is how it is.” They move beyond the boundary of the normal scholarly apparatus; that boundary does not concern them. The same apparatus is used in the critical analysis of art as in the workings of philosophy, for example, where concepts that already exist are debated. Thus, the art system of the 1970s and immediately afterwards was self-sufficient and possessed immense self-awareness. One might say that these were times when art historians could not keep up with artists. My question, then, is this: in invoking these figures, are you expressing nostalgia for that model of art?

ZL: I would like it to return. I consider it the most important art. It was this art that led to Polish art looking as it did in the 1990s. Later, artificial methods—that is, censorship and political pressure—were used to drive out the critical artists and replace them with the Sasnals and others, and in this way a certain discourse within art was broken. In my view, there is continuity between these artists and the artists of so-called critical art. Critical artists adopted many of their methods and modes of behaviour, although they are slightly different kinds of artists. More generally, when I think back to earlier times, we simply had two circuits of art: one official and one unofficial; in simple terms, one associated with the Church and one not associated with it. But we were always in that other circuit. Now we are supposedly recognised and have supposedly been noticed, yet we remain in a different circuit. That earlier circuit still operates somewhere according to some principle. The best artists, it has turned out, are those who have come to dominate art, and they descend from these artists—the masters. How is it, then, that in art history they are still preceded by Abakanowicz and Kantor?