Between Freedom and Independence: A Question Addressed to Art?

If the artist is not at the same time a craftsman, he is simply nothing; the misfortune, however, is that most artists are merely craftsmen.

Wenn der Künstler nicht zugleich Handwerker ist, so ist er nichts, aber das Unglück! unsre meisten Künstler sind nur Handwerker (J. W. von Goethe to J. G. Röderer, 21 September 1771)

The films of the well-known poster designer Tadeusz Piechura—who, through the minimalism of his monochromatic poster forms, achieved a high degree of artistic expression without subtracting an iota from the semantic content conveyed by his works—allow us, metaphorically, to pose one of the most important questions concerning the essence of art:

what do his kinetic structures, capturing the isolated space between Freedom Square and Independence Square, wish to express?

And thus to what extent does contemporary art—above all European art, Polish art—move between these “poles of a single axis, a single city, an enclosed space”, so close to one another in meaning yet suggesting a difference that is a matter of indifference to most of its recipients—or, perhaps more accurately, consumers of “popular culture” and its pop art?

This indifference towards art, this failure to notice it, is de facto blindness to visual phenomena: the very phenomenon with which art (though not only art) and its creators have been confronted since the dawn of its existence, creators who ultimately did not hesitate to seek a way of revealing the invisible. For they reflected, and continue to reflect, this experience of the world’s indifference towards art, but also art’s indifference towards the world.

The phenomenon of indifference, meanwhile, understood as the quidditas of the world, gives all human effort a common meaning, which is precisely this: the attempt continually to overcome indifference. (Leszek Kołakowski, The Presence of Myth, Wrocław, 1994, p. 84)

One might therefore venture the paradoxical formulation that art’s aspiration was to struggle against the indifference of the unseeing viewer—an aspiration that consequently led to the creation of invisible works, whose proper and intended perception nevertheless depended, and continues to depend, upon motivating their immanent “why this way rather than another”: that is, upon a text whose expressive power may, through other senses, permit a return to the work and its essence. It is therefore no accident that in German the reception or perception of a work is called “Wahrnehmung”, literally “taking as true”. Such an understanding of perception is not interpretation but a “reading” of the meanings conveyed by the work, that is, their decoding, even though the truth of art sensu stricto remains the subject of every discourse, which involuntarily opens an abyss of transcendental sensations connected with every attempt to confront a work of art. We cannot fail to notice that this touches upon the eternal problem of the relativity of truth, especially since I consciously emphasise the distinction between “interpretation” and “reading/decoding” as the contradiction between a subjective and an objectivising reception/perception of the “true” work of art. At the same time, I bear in mind its concrete situation in life (Sitz im Leben): a cultural intentionality also manifested in aesthetic categories, which Umberto Eco presented with his characteristic forceful irony in his latest Storia della bellezza (2004, History of Beauty), without concealing the boundlessness of certain aspects—particularly the contemporary elevation of matter to the heights of artistic experience. This may have caused the failure to notice what wishes to pass for art. It is therefore unsurprising that for Arthur Danto no work of art de facto exists today.

Joseph Margolis, the well-known Philadelphia philosopher and art critic whose essays and writings have in part been translated into Polish, comments on his colleague Danto’s view that works of art no longer exist:

“Presumably, this is because ‘their’ intentional properties—representationality and expressiveness—have rhetorically been called ‘merely real objects’, by virtue of which ‘they’ become rhetorically accessible. /…/ Clearly, for Danto, works of art are what we imagine, fictionally, while—through rhetoric or ‘transfiguration’—we interpret ‘ordinary real things’ (principally physical or utilitarian objects) as belonging to the ethos or ‘artworld’.” (J. Margolis, What, After All, Is a Work of Art? (1999), Kraków, 2004, p. 81)

Failure to notice—that is, a failure to receive optical impressions—need not be identical with “blindness” as a sensory incapacity of sight. Nevertheless, failure to notice is so widespread a phenomenon that even Atlas Sztuki—consciously, or perhaps only subconsciously—undertook a colossal leap in order to be perceived.

One need only glance at the first catalogue, for Roman Opałka’s exhibition (2003), and at the latest issue of ATLAS SZTUKI (6, September–October 2004) to discover the pop-art truth of the moment: if you want to be noticed, you must shout; you must bombard with format, patches of colour, colour itself. Perhaps, then, Tadeusz Piechura’s present presentation is a reflection between these two poles: silence, whiteness and imperceptibility on one side, and the brutal blow culminating in a paradox on the other—first, the “reproducibility of art” (Walter Benjamin) driven to absurdity in Laura Pawela’s computer vision; second, a return to utopian naïveté in the spirit of Henri Rousseau or even Marc Chagall, manifested in Krzysztof Skarbek’s large canvases, which consciously reveal humanity’s eternal dream of final happiness encoded in all the myths of human cultures. How else are we to understand his statement:

“Generally, I am concerned with creating a better, more interesting world, with a true and sincere view of the present situation.” (in conversation with Dr Krzysztof Cichoń, Atlas Sztuki 6/2004, p. 20)

At this point an entire complex of reflections concealed within the relationship between MYTH and GAZE unexpectedly opens up, expressed by the ancient Egyptians in the concept of the so-called Wedjat Eye, nothing other than the prototype of the universally familiar “Eye of God”, the only eye that sees everything and from which nothing can be hidden.

For to see means to know, and not only because this is so well expressed by the etymology of these words, whose roots lie in Sanskrit, where the concept of the Veda remains known to some even today, and not only to Indologists. This is why the development of art is always accompanied by the question of its function: what is it to depict, what is it to convey—mythical truth or “reality”, extending to the obsessions of trompe l’œil or Duane Hanson’s sculptures? The eye is therefore a symbol of the eternal confrontation with God and human imperfection. Nor is it an accident that Maria Poprzęcka, in her interesting lecture An Eye for an Eye, quoted a poem by Tadeusz Różewicz:

Why did I open my eyes

I am flooded by a world of shapes and colours

wave after wave

shape after shape

colour after colour

abandoned to

venomous greens

cold blues

intense yellow suns

bright red lobsters

I am insatiable.

(after M. Poprzęcka, “An Eye for an Eye”, in The Artist’s Thought, Eye and Hand: Studies on the Genesis of the Creative Process, ed. Ryszard Kasperowicz and Elżbieta Wolicka, Lublin, 2003, p. 39)

Descartes is therefore right in his statement: wherever sight is spoken of, a blind man is not far away. Human imperfection becomes conscious at this point, and not only in relation to the blind figures of Bosch and Bruegel, but also to the truth that may be seen gnostically when deprived of the light of the eyes—and, not by accident, in dreams, whose mystery often forms the basis of every fantasy, perhaps also of the independent and free, yet so elusive fantasy.

Indifference towards “art” may be an expression of the devalued concepts of freedom and independence, which have de facto become slogans in the meantime. Only a few can contend with them, even though every one of us carries one of these notions on our lips—but are they lips that truly speak the truth?

Before our gaze concentrates on aspects of visualisation, both perceived and unperceived, also encompassing the so-called visual arts, whose boundaries with other forms of artistic expression are becoming increasingly blurred, it becomes necessary—nota bene, with growing frequency—to reflect on the essence of words circulated through non-verbal subtexts. To explain this essence, one need not necessarily resort to Derrida or other “postmodernists”, whose ahistorical attitude is anything but a meaningful commentary on a situation, object or its situation in life, that is, within a specific time and place. For here lies a fundamental difference between the historian (of art or even culture) and the philosopher or aesthetician. The position of the latter is—or perhaps should be—metaphysical, attempting to grasp the overall mechanism of one phenomenon or another independently of its historical situation. History, meanwhile, asks:

when, why and for whom did this or that work (perhaps even a work of art) arise, sublimating the human imagination shaped by the mentality of time and space?

Thus, faced with the attempt at a distinctive visualisation of the time that elapsed between the making of these two quasi-documentary strips of celluloid by Tadeusz Piechura, presented here, a distinctive struggle arises between the phenomenon of timelessness and the historical fact of passing. We may naturally ask whether we are truly conscious of passing, or instead do everything to eliminate it from our consciousness by rejecting memory as a reflection upon memorisation contained in the apparent arrest of time. In Tadeusz Piechura’s films, we can indeed observe changes—that is, aspects of passing—but at the same time, along the axis of Piotrkowska Street, elements of memorialising the past in the form of the architectural preservation of historical memories of old Łódź. Thus this is not only Mnemosyne’s bow towards the ancestors and their vision of the city, the world and, ultimately, life, but also a distinctive resignation from cultivating one’s own traces. For if the stars and names absorbed by the paving stones, or bronze sculptures of famous inhabitants of Łódź, are to count as such traces, then this seems to express a continued cultivation of the past in two ways: the return of those from elsewhere as a continuation of recognised traditions, or perhaps even of protests that over time become an integral part of the tradition against which they were once directed.

This familiar “vicious circle” can be observed perfectly in the context of all revolutions, as protests not only social but artistic—and not merely since Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists, but from the dawn of every manifestation of criticism of existing situations in the world of signs and ideas alike. There is one fundamental difference: the more time has passed since events not personally experienced (that is, devoid of subjective sensations), the less their power of protest is felt. Who today appreciates the act of Phidias, who represented himself on the deity’s shield [fifth century BC]? Who still reflects upon Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa [1817] as a “documentary” eruption of humanism, a protest against the ossified and corrupt structures of ministerial and military administration under the French Restoration? Who still feels the pathos of The Massacre (by the Turks) at Chios [1824] by the great colourist and Romantic Eugène Delacroix in the face of the almost uncritical acceptance of its perpetrators as fellow Europeans today? Who still sees in Édouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass [1863] a protest against the contemporary reception and subject matter of art—in the world of pop-(sub)culture, alienated from every reflection on being as the history of human culture? The freedom and lightness of life that permits little more than sex and design, elevated to values per se despite their temporally limited insignificance cradled in the abyss of passing, rejects history as a necessary imperative of culture. This is why the old maxim carpe diem has lost none of its relevance; on the contrary, it has acquired a new content—strangely, especially among those who imagine that they themselves, in the blindness that motivates their indifference towards art’s iconicity, or at least towards what remains of it, invented it! And supposedly in pursuit of freedom, self-determination and independence.

In short, then, what do these concepts, which have grown to the dimensions of intoxicating phenomena, mean for ourselves and for art? 

No less has been written about freedom than about love, and the connotations of both phenomena therefore remain in the sphere of subjective sensations. Within art in particular—in relation to what some postulate should be understood by the concept—they extend infinitely between Schiller’s pathetic watchword immortalised in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the silence of meditation in a distant gompa, a Tibetan monastery, or a forgotten studio on the outskirts of one of those cities where art arises and dies. What, then, is this artistic freedom?

A subjective liberation from every canon, trace and stigma of history, or merely a demand addressed to one’s own ego (which, nota bene, unconsciously and for genetic reasons is not free of them, at least in the form of archetypes), exculpating itself as something exclusively its own and individual? This opens the door to the aforementioned self-determination: is it always creative?—an elementary component of every “independence”, as independent dependence.

If any independence exists at all as a sine qua non of every form of independence, including creative independence, it is illusory, and for many reasons denied by numerous “apostles of contemporaneity” through the clamour of their happenings. Whether Joseph Beuys or Jörg Immendorff, both in their process of independent individualisation sought the media mirror—not, unfortunately, of the soul, but only of their own narcissism, sometimes bound by their own irony and distanced from the rest… The rest without which their autonomy cannot exist, just as it cannot disappear into the Kabbalistic, almost invisible infinities of the digital images of Roman Opałka, shown here a year ago. In his own narcissism and in contradiction to the Delphic statue, a fragment of which contrasts with the self-portrait hanging in his studio, Opałka achieves the signs of independent passing by merging with his own work. Hence his formulation:

My decisions result directly from the idea of my creative practice. They depend upon it alone, and not upon the world that remains outside its domain. Thus, for example, the photographic Details required a series of different visual solutions. One concerned the shirt I wear when the photograph is taken. Its neutral character is an indispensable element in preserving the uniformity of the photographs and combining them into a whole of photographic self-portraits. /…/ The white shirt possesses a specific meaning: I chose white to accompany my undertaking, so that one day it might unite with the “image” of white upon white. (Opałka 1965/1–∞, Atlas Sztuki, Łódź, 2003, p. 11)

is symptomatic of many contemporary representatives of what departs from the familiar canon of classical modernism. Admittedly, the majority of artists, or those wishing to pass as such, reject their connection with that modernism, because in their protest against tradition they wish to have nothing to do with it or its representatives. This immediately raises the question of “sovereign, independent” art. Is such art possible at all, or does it lie solely within the competence of utopians—who are more numerous than the proverbial dulcimer players unable to match Jankiel? 

This is a great dilemma, but like every dilemma it seems capable of solution—not only in many layers, as Derrida and his like would have it, but in an attempt to realise what is happening in the sphere of art, which is sometimes, perhaps too often, identified with artists—that is, with those certified as such by a document. This is why “the emperor’s new clothes” have for years become symptomatic at many openings that seek total liberation and total independence from others and the world, thereby revealing their indifference towards the world and others. Yet those who supposedly reject this world require its presence in order to perform before it an exhibitionism freed from every prohibition, and not only in the metaphorical sense of the word. The exposure of one’s own psychological states, problems, inclinations and anomalies as proof of freedom and independence is merely apparent, because the question of where the freedom of others—those looking—remains does not trouble these proverbial “masters” of tormented souls at all. In such a situation, the public often assumes a therapeutic function and seeks art where it was not previously perceived. In this way photography acquired value over time, although its practitioners so often emphasised that they were merely craftsmen. Yet their vision, fixed on paper, replaced what had been sought in art for centuries and, as we can see, continues to be sought. And if the “art” of artists does not do this, viewers turn creators of aesthetic objects of everyday life—as already happened in seventeenth-century Dutch art—into artists and elevate their works to the status of true art, for what would the world be without art? (…denn was wäre die Welt ohne Kunst?, J. W. von Goethe, Tag- und Jahreshefte, 1805, 11,753)

* Piotr O. Scholz, habilitated doctor, is a professor at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, where he heads the Department of Comparative Art History within the Institute of Cultural Studies. He also continues to teach art history at the Institute of Art History at the University of Innsbruck, where, nota bene, he initiated an exhibition of Tadeusz Piechura’s posters to be held at the University of Innsbruck gallery in November and December 2004.