A Modern Cabinet of Curiosities, or the Art of Gestures

An important element of Polish artistic life before 1989 was the artist-run gallery: a place for presenting art, independent of official cultural policy and often founded and managed by artists themselves. The Exchange Gallery was one such venue. It was established relatively late, in 1978, but by an artist who had been an active participant in and critical observer of Polish artistic life since the 1960s.

The Exchange Gallery stood apart from other artist-run galleries.¹ While most Polish artist-run galleries of the 1960s and 1970s sought the support of an institution or organisation in order to maintain a reasonably regular exhibition programme, the Exchange Gallery ostentatiously emphasised its private, domestic character. “This home gallery will exist until the end of my life. It is bound up with me, and I shall never be able to close it because it is not something material […] it is an institution that exists through my life,” Józef Robakowski said in one interview.² The Exchange Gallery was more an archive or database collecting information about new art in Poland and abroad than a conventional gallery. Its golden age came in the 1980s, when Robakowski began documenting various manifestations of Poland’s independent art movement and his gallery co-organised events of major importance to the independent art scene: New Phenomena in Polish Art of the 1970s (Sopot, 1981); Breakwater: Polish Art of the 1970s (Łódź, 1981); Artistic Pilgrimage: Long Live Art! (Łódź, 1983); Polish Avant-Garde (Poolse ‘avant-garde’, Antwerp, 1985); the Video-Art-Clip Festival (Łódź, 1987, 1988 and 1989); and The Dungeons of Manhattan, or the Art of New Media (Łódź, 1989).

Galleries — and art institutions more broadly — have an enormous influence on art because they impose a particular way of thinking about it. The Exchange Gallery likewise championed a particular conception of art that it sought to promote and disseminate. Józef Robakowski called it “Pitch-In Culture”. Art created within Pitch-In Culture can appear anywhere and assume any form, for it is an art of “gestures made on one’s own responsibility, wholly unrestrained by civilisation”. It is art “independent of politicians, police, the Church, administrators and artists themselves”: art driven by the energy released when artists meet. “No doctrine or mental rule applies here.” This art presupposes nihilism, because only “intellectual (positive) nihilism can preserve the artist’s status in the present age”.³

The text Kultura zrzuty (Pitch-in Culture) was written in 1984 and therefore necessarily concerned art — or, more precisely, artists’ activity — under martial law. For Robakowski, however, Pitch-In Culture was not merely the artists’ response to martial law. It had been anticipated in the 1970s and even the 1960s, and was connected with Conceptual art. Conceptual art sensitised artists to the gesture. Marcel Duchamp’s gesture was, of course, the paradigm. Art is a gesture: a gesture undertaken on the artist’s own responsibility. A gesture towards art and towards other artists. This means that a gesture is always bound to a specific time and place, as well as to the artistic, social, political and cultural context. What matters is the right gesture at the right time and place. Modern art is a collection of such gestures — artists’ personal, autonomous gestures expressing their freedom — and at the source of them all lies Marcel Duchamp’s inaugural, foundational gesture, described and discussed for decades by art historians and aestheticians.⁴

The artist’s gesture reminds us that art cannot be reduced to objects or to the production of objects. Objects are merely traces, records of the artist’s gestures. Giorgio Agamben distinguishes the gesture from making (facere) and acting (agere).⁵ In making, the end lies outside the act: making is a means to an end, to producing something such as a work of art. In acting — or performing — the end lies in the action itself, in its success or felicity. In both cases we are dealing with an identifiable end. The gesture is different: it eludes an end and merely reveals a certain attitude, a relation to something, like a facial expression. For a gesture to endure, however, it must assume some material, objective form. Robakowski found an elegant formula for this objective form: the “mental object”, an object that recalls a gesture made at a particular moment and in some way meaningful or important to that moment.

Józef Robakowski’s Exchange Gallery seeks to preserve the memory

of artists’ gestures. This is the purpose of the archive amassed by the Exchange Gallery and of all the exhibitions and presentations of its holdings that Robakowski has organised in recent years — in Bydgoszcz (1996), Budapest (1997), Berlin (2000) and Prague (2002). The Belly of Atlas belongs to this sequence of presentations, while differing from them in an important respect. Here Robakowski returns to his very early fascinations. While still a student in Toruń, sometime in the late 1950s, he became fascinated by provincial collections and memorial rooms created by enthusiasts of local culture who gathered everything that manifested human activity in a particular area. “On the basis of these principles, on 1 April 1965 the ZERO-61 group organised an exhibition as a cabinet of curiosities and strange objects, a kind of modernist Wunderkammer. By seeing art in this way — as a joke, as play — we avoided the official line. And in Poland, where there was no Dadaist tradition, we took a step in that direction. Although it was a joke, it became a turning point for us because it showed how the existing artistic tradition could be challenged. Students and amateurs, all those who were not trained artists, could do something similar. The longer you consider yourself an amateur and hobbyist, the longer you remain creative.”⁶

The Belly of Atlas is presided over by an early work of Józef Robakowski: a photograph of a colander fastened to a plank with a large nail (Colander, 1961). What did exhibiting this work represent? A gesture of art or anti-art? Did Robakowski want us to recognise the work as art, or was it instead intended to challenge the received artistic tradition and prevailing concept of art? Was it meant to degrade photography to the status of a banal object, or sanction it as a new artistic medium? Józef Robakowski has always valued such gestures — ambiguous, difficult to classify, troublesome for critics, “unidentified”, as he liked to call them. The Belly of Atlas summons such gestures from the Exchange Gallery’s rich holdings. They are gestures by artists of different generations, associated with Robakowski during successive periods of his artistic biography: artists from the Toruń ZERO-61 group (Andrzej Różycki), the Film Form Workshop (Wacław Antczak), the 1970s (Andrzej Partum, Zygmunt Rytka, Jiří Valoch and Krzysztof Zarębski), the Pitch-In Culture of the early 1980s (Marek Janiak, Jacek Kryszkowski and Ewa Zarzycka), and finally the youngest artists (Maurycy Gomulicki, Grzegorz Drozd, Artur Malewski, Jadwiga Sawicka, Aleksandra Ska and Karolina Breguła). Each is represented by one or several works situated somewhere on the boundary between art and non-art, because that is where authentic gestures most deeply rooted in the maker’s existence arise — gestures that may, though need not, subsequently acquire artistic status. Such is the Colander invoked here, which Maria Morzuch calls “famous”:⁷ famous because it has been shown many times in important exhibitions.

The gesture is connected with ethics — with the ethics of art — because it concerns why, at a given moment, an artist does this particular thing rather than something else. It concerns the choice to which everyone who is or wishes to be an artist is condemned. Artists must make choices, even though they cannot state the criteria guiding them, because no such criteria exist in art. Art history and knowledge of predecessors’ achievements can offer the artist some support, but if an artist does not wish to continue or merely imitate even the most magnificent tradition, they must appeal to their own sense of freedom. Robakowski calls this “positive nihilism”, which assumes that freedom is the ontological foundation of artistic ethics — of ethics in general, Foucault would say. The artist’s gesture must be the gesture of a free person, one not enslaved by artistic, political or social constraints. Years ago, when writing about the art of Solidarity and martial law, Piotr Piotrowski contrasted the artistic gesture with the civic gesture, yet sensed the inadequacy of this opposition.⁸ The artistic gesture is not the opposite of the civic gesture; both may spring from a source in freedom or be imposed upon the artist from outside — through artistic or political compulsion.

Recalling the ZERO-61 group’s first exhibition, Józef Robakowski used the phrase “modernist Wunderkammer”. This formulation calls to mind Jean-François Lyotard’s enigmatic thought that “a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern”.⁹ The artist’s gesture, which from the modernist perspective appears strange or curious, announces the postmodern work. The Belly of Atlas presents such postmodern works while defending what has always mattered most to Robakowski: the artist’s gesture. Józef Robakowski might say of himself what Michel Foucault once said: “I am a moralist because I believe that the source of human freedom is opposition to what seeks to pass as definitive, incontrovertible, obvious and ineradicable.”¹⁰

*Professor Grzegorz Dziamski is an aesthetician and art theorist, head of the Department of Research on Artistic Culture at the Institute of Cultural Studies, and professor at Adam Mickiewicz University and the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. His research concerns contemporary aesthetics, postmodern artistic theory and practice, Central European art and the institutional analysis of art. He is the author of books and edited volumes, editor of the Polish selection of Clement Greenberg’s essays W obronie modernizmu [In Defence of Modernism] (2006), and of the volume Od awangardy do postmodernizmu [From the Avant-Garde to Postmodernism] in the Encyclopaedia of Polish Culture (1996).

1. On artist-run galleries of the 1970s, see G. Dziamski, Przestrzeń artystyczna; galerie autorskie [Artistic Space: Artist-Run Galleries], in Szkice o nowej sztuce [Essays on New Art], Warsaw 1984, pp. 118–153.
2. Być z Józefem Robakowskim [Being with Józef Robakowski] (interview with Danuta Ćwirko-Godycka), in J. Robakowski, Teksty interwencyjne 1970–1995 [Intervention Texts, 1970–1995], Koszalin 1995, p. 132.

3. J. Robakowski, Kultura zrzuty [Pitch-In Culture], Uwaga, no. 1, 1988; repr. in J. Robakowski, Teksty interwencyjne…
4. Łukasz Ronduda writes that “only in the 1970s did it become possible in Poland to repeat Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 gesture of submitting Fountain to an exhibition of modern art”. Ł. Ronduda, Nihilizm w sztuce Józefa Robakowskiego [Nihilism in the Art of Józef Robakowski], in Miraże Józefa R. [Mirages of Józef R.], Łódź 2007, p. 50. This is true, but it concerns Duchamp’s gesture as a gesture of art rather than anti-art, since it could have appeared earlier as a gesture of anti-art.

5. G. Agamben, Uwagi o geście [Notes on Gesture], in Agamben. Przewodnik Krytyki Politycznej [Agamben: A Krytyka Polityczna Guide], Warsaw 2010, pp. 301–302.
6. “… I Reject Temporality”, interview with Józef Robakowski, Fair. Zeitung für Kunst und Aesthetik, Vienna/Berlin 2009, no. 4. The exhibition took place at the Od Nowa club in Toruń.

7. M. Morzuch, Miraże Józefa R. [Mirages of Józef R.], in Miraże Józefa R., Łódź 2007, p. 6.
8. “As a citizen, the artist should speak on public matters. Yet artists need not fulfil their civic duties through art. Artistic and civic responsibility essentially concern different spheres of action. This does not mean they cannot overlap. They can, provided that the appropriate proportions are preserved. The displacement of aesthetic values by ethical ones, and artistic values by civic ones, though worthy of respect, may ultimately have dangerous consequences.” It is unclear what should follow from these reflections: that art is unnecessary in times of social conflict, or precisely the opposite — that it is then particularly necessary? P. Piotrowski, Filozofia gestu [The Philosophy of Gesture], in Sztuka polska po 1945 roku [Polish Art after 1945], Warsaw 1987, p. 252.
9. J.-F. Lyotard, Odpowiedź na pytanie: co to jest ponowoczesność? [Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?], in Postmodernizm dla dzieci [Postmodernism for Children], Warsaw 1998, p. 24 (translation modified).
10. M. Foucault, Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual: An Interview with Michael Bess (1980), michaelbess.net/foucault-interview.