Mirabilia

In The Belly of an Architect (1987), Peter Greenaway presents an ambiguous story played out on two planes. It is the tragedy of an architect who arrives in Italy to make an exhibition about another architect, the eighteenth-century visionary Étienne-Louis Boullée. The drama lasts nine months. During this time, entangled in a web of intrigue, the protagonist loses his project, unborn child, wife, health and ultimately his life. The action unfolds in Rome and, simultaneously, in the architect’s belly. His abdomen and internal organs hurt with increasing intensity and escape his control. Greenaway suggests an unnamed but close connection between the architect’s gastric troubles and the fortunes of his undertaking. Architecture is reflected in anatomy; the creative process has its analogy in physiology. In this story, art possesses entrails: dark, mysterious and unhealthily bloated.

The Belly of an Architect leads us to The Belly of Atlas, an exhibition curated by Professor Józef Robakowski. We suspect that the title’s evocation of Greenaway’s film is no accident: the exhibition’s author draws our attention to art’s particular anatomy and physiology, with special emphasis upon its internal organs.

Inside Atlas’s Belly

By his nature, Atlas ought to carry something upon his shoulders. In this case, let us assume that he bears the mission of presenting art. This time, however, our attention is directed not towards Atlas’s shoulders but his belly. The exhibition space is to be plunged into darkness, which viewers must dispel with pocket torches as they search for exhibits on their own. It is therefore difficult to decide whether the artefacts are being displayed or instead concealed within a gallery transformed into an image of the art system’s dark entrails.

Józef Robakowski, who conceived The Belly of Atlas, is known as a classic of structural film, an analytical artist who closely examines the material of image-based media, a creator regarded as heir to the avant-garde tradition, including its Constructivist narrative. Yet Robakowski also reveals another face: that of a Neo-Dadaist anarchist who, instead of “constructing” works, deconstructs the art system’s rigid hierarchies. “Analyticity is a kind of spine here, a structure,” Robakowski says, “but the person within that structure remains biological, with weaknesses and imperfections.” Upon art’s hard skeleton — understood as an institutionalised practice confirmed by finished works — rests the soft tissue of unrestrained creativity, relationships among artists, emotions and intuitions. It is here that the physiological processes of artistic exchange and the digestion of risky ideas occur.

Inside the Cabinet of Curiosities

Robakowski confronts the corporeal metaphor of the exhibition space as a belly with another figure: the institution of the Kunstkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities.

Entering the Cabinet of Curiosities, we step into the prehistory of the modern museum. Here is the museum at the moment of its birth, in a state resembling Primordial Chaos, where all elements remain intermingled, neither top nor bottom exists, things fall freely in every direction and even Heaven has not been separated from Earth. The institution of the Kunstkammer and Cabinet of Curiosities, with roots in the Renaissance, concealed collections of an encyclopaedic nature — collections of everything. They held works of art, historical mementoes and religious relics, but also objects brought from distant lands; items of ethnographic interest neighboured unusual geological finds and wonders of nature, the remains of rare and exotic animals, as well as specimens of assorted pathologies and “freaks of nature”, such as the proverbial two-headed calf. The creators of Cabinets aspired to build complete microcosms, representations of the World as Collection. From a political perspective, Kunstkammern were allegories of their founders’ power: they encompassed the whole of reality within their gaze, compressing it into the syncretic exhibition space of the Kunstkammer. The modern museum brought order to the Kunstkammer’s chaos through specialisation, hierarchies and precisely delineated boundaries between fields of knowledge. In a sense, the modern, incomparably more self-aware museum is merely a pale and fragmentary shadow of the Borgesian utopia of the Kunstkammer as a total collection.

Along the path by which Józef Robakowski reached the idea of the Cabinet of Curiosities stood its late and modest heirs: the local memorial rooms and provincial collections that flourished in small Polish towns during the Polish People’s Republic. In theory, these collections were to centre on material mementoes of local history; in practice they could — and did — also contain wonders of nature and examples of its intriguing phenomena. Such collections interested Robakowski not so much for the objects themselves as because the form of these open, spontaneously created collections reflected the mentality and realm of ideas of the community preserving them. The criterion of artistic value was secondary to the emotional and symbolic energy carried by individual exhibits.

An Exhibition in a Dark Room

Robakowski first activated the Cabinet of Curiosities as a model for challenging and questioning existing artistic orders and hierarchies in the 1960s. Together with alternative artistic formations he had helped to establish, the artist made exhibitions close to the Kunstkammer formula. While still studying museology and conservation in Toruń, he organised an exhibition with the Krąg Group (1965–67), which operated as a student association. It can be seen both as an ironic dialogue with the tradition of the Cabinet of Curiosities and as a prehistory of The Belly of Atlas. It was, as Robakowski puts it, “an exhibition in a dark room”, arranged while the student gallery Od Nowa was being renovated, during a kind of interval in its regular activity. Spotlights brought peculiar exhibits out of the darkness: Neo-Dadaist works by members of the group — “tawdry curios”, as Robakowski calls them today — but also a fabricated two-headed calf, stuffed animals and a whale bone borrowed from the university collection. The Kunstkammer model likewise encompassed projects such as the exhibition The Forge, made with the ZERO-61 Group in 1969.

In these activities we should not underestimate the element of sheer play, irreverence and disinterested joy that always arises from introducing absurdity into an ordered reality. Within the Polish People’s Republic, where this order was openly oppressive, the joy was naturally all the greater. “I am convinced that the artist is a kind of perfidious charlatan, a social ulcer whose vitality lies precisely in manipulating on his own account as an expression of self-defence against annihilation — that is, public acceptance,” Józef Robakowski wrote in his 1988 manifesto I Manipulate!. He presents himself as a “mocking rogue” and emphasises the creative function of making mischief within culture. Yet a deeper meaning lay within the game: creating “strange” situations — situations incomprehensible within accepted conventions — surreptitiously destabilises the system obstructing creative freedom and challenges received hierarchies that constrain creation. “Mischief-making”, mocking and absurd gestures disarmed the oppressive order of culture under the Polish People’s Republic. Have they retained this subversive potential today?

The Exchange Gallery

Before answering, let us look at another Cabinet of Curiosities: the Exchange Gallery, whose holdings form the core of The Belly of Atlas. This is not the place to discuss the gallery’s complex history and nature in detail.¹ Let us recall only that this private, entirely independent and unique institution is Józef Robakowski’s authorial project.

The history of the Exchange Gallery is formally dated from 1978, but its origins are much earlier and deeply rooted in the nature of Józef Robakowski’s artistic practice. Despite its name, the Exchange Gallery is not a gallery in the strict sense, but rather a set, collection or “dynamic archive”. It comprises works by artists from around the world, but also printed matter, texts, correspondence, film and audio recordings, and various artistic marginalia. The Exchange Gallery makes no purchases: every element in the collection was acquired through exchanges between artists and Józef Robakowski or was received as a gift. It replaces the market economy with an economy of friendship, personal contact and relationships among creators. It is also an anti-hierarchical collection and in this sense remains close to the Kunstkammer model.

It contains works by iconic figures of the international neo-avant-garde, but also pieces by marginal artists, amateurs and outsiders, as well as productions from beyond the main body of recognised artists’ practices: curios, oddities and things created especially for Józef Robakowski by his friends. When it was founded, with its headquarters in Robakowski’s private flat, the Exchange Gallery offered an alternative, independent institution — in fact an anti-institution, because the institutional criterion of art was negated and rejected. In other words, Robakowski unhesitatingly includes within the Exchange Gallery’s holdings elements that do not qualify as works of art but carry a particular creative energy, transforming these artefacts into “mental objects”.²

Here we return to the metaphor of art’s belly, the organ in which slow digestive processes take place. At first, avant-garde gestures and works by outsiders and dissenters are often indigestible to the art system. Yet what initially appears indigestible, even poisonous, can in time be assimilated — indeed, recognised as an exceptionally nourishing delicacy. The Exchange Gallery was always prepared to consume proposals the art system deemed inedible; it thus became the belly in which digestion occurred. Years later, things once treated as rubbish begin to be seen as underappreciated treasures. The changing reception of Józef Robakowski’s own work offers the best illustration of this process: once regarded as a de facto anti-artistic activity, it has made Robakowski a contemporary classic today.

Józef Robakowski has activated the Exchange Gallery’s “dynamic archive” on numerous occasions, and its rich holdings have provided the basis and material for a series of projects. The Belly of Atlas is one such project, conceived as a dark Kunstkammer in which viewers equipped with torches independently discover works of art, images, films, objects and curios from the Exchange Gallery. By definition, Robakowski’s conception of the collection is open and inclusive; artefacts that do not formally belong to it can, and do, appear in the exhibition. This category includes works by Maurycy Gomulicki, a tireless seeker of wonders and curios within popular culture and contemporary metropolitan folklore; Grzegorz Drozd’s Surrealising pictures poised on the boundary of pastiche; and Artur Malewski’s narrative sculptures. Fascinated by the borderland among humanity, animality and the natural world, Malewski creates a bestiary. He makes protagonists of people affected by particular anatomical anomalies, such as the famous nineteenth-century Elephant Man or the contemporary Indonesian Dede, the Tree Man.

It remains to answer the question of the exhibition-as-Cabinet-of-Curiosities formula’s subversive potential: a place where prevailing artistic hierarchies are suspended, young artists can neighbour recognised classics, and finished works can sit beside objects of unknown purpose unearthed by Józef Robakowski at Bałucki Market. The question arises in the context of art’s advancing institutionalisation. Paradoxically, the process of formalising artistic hierarchies now seems to operate even faster and more efficiently than under the Polish People’s Republic, although guided by differently defined political aims. Intersecting with this “soft” power, which uses the marginalisation and exclusion of creators from artistic discourse instead of repression, is the art market, which defines the question of a work’s value in the most literal manner by calculating it with economic tools. In this context, the question of the subversive power and necessity of a project such as The Belly of Atlas seems purely rhetorical.

1. A comprehensive history of the gallery and an interesting analysis of its status, ontology and character can be found in Dr Isabelle Schwarz’s extensive article The Exchange Gallery, in Archive für Künstlerpublikationen der 1960er bis 1980er Jahre, Salon Verlag, Cologne 2008. Information about the Gallery is also available on its website: www.exchange-gallery.pl. See also Łukasz Ronduda, Polish Art of the 1970s: The Avant-Garde, Polski Western, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw 2009.

1. For more on Józef Robakowski’s concept of “mental objects”, see the materials accompanying the exhibition Mental Objects, Studio Mozer, Łódź 2003, at www.exchange-gallery.pl/obiekty_mentalne/obiekty_mentalne.html.