An Ingenious Juxtaposition

How could the works of Krzysztof Skarbek and Laura Pawela have come to be juxtaposed? What conditions had to arise, what factors had to come together for the idea of this exhibition to appear? I cannot give a precise answer to that question, because the idea did not appear in my mind. Yet I believe one thing can be known apriori: if it really was an ‘idea’, then the process of its genesis must, as it were by definition, have been marked by a certain fortuity. For if we are to believe the idiomatic and highly inventive expressions of the Polish language, an idea is something one hits upon, something that happens to thought, imposes itself upon it, suddenly springs to mind and comes into one’s head accidentally, almost mechanically. An idea cannot be manufactured; it is not simply the outcome of a deliberate effort of the mind or imagination, and it remains heterogeneous and discontinuous in relation to stimulation, brainstorming or heuristic techniques. These do not guarantee its arrival. They can, however, provide an opportunity for it.

Thus we have two motifs: ‘juxtaposition’ and ‘idea’. Can the juxtaposition we encounter here and now, in the case of Pawela and Skarbek’s exhibition, be called ingenious? Whatever answer we give, it is worth considering the relationship that may obtain between these two motifs. For it seems that ‘juxtaposition’ defines a kind of mechanism or operational schema of that natural capacity for ideas which we call ingenuity. John Locke persuades us of this when he writes in AnEssay ConcerningHumanUnderstanding that ingenuity [wit] ‘lies most in the assemblage of ideas [assemblageofideas], and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy: judgment [judgement], on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully, one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude and by affinity to take one thing for another. This is a way of proceeding quite contrary to metaphor and allusion; wherein, for the most part, lies that entertainment and pleasantry of wit [wit], which strikes so lively on the fancy, and therefore, so acceptable to all people; because its beauty appears at first sight, and there is required no labour of thought [labourofthought] to examine what truth or reason there is in it. The mind, without looking any further, rests satisfied with the agreeableness of the picture and the gaiety of the fancy’¹.

Ingenuity is defined here as a juxtaposition, an ‘assemblage’ of ideas. Although Locke mentions the ‘variety’ of possible juxtapositions, he restricts it to the sphere of resemblance and affinity. Juxtaposition on the basis of difference, or indeed affinity-in-difference, is excluded in his view. Difference is the domain of another natural capacity: judgement. The latter consists in separating ideas that differ from one another. Yet it is impossible not to notice the peculiar ambivalence of this entire passage: in order to distinguish and separate ingenuity and judgement, as well as to contrast the corresponding sets of terms (on the one hand, resemblance, affinity, metaphor, allusion, imagination, pleasure and so forth; on the other, difference, separation, the labour of thought, justification and so forth), Locke must simultaneously juxtapose them – and this juxtaposition is remarkably ingenious. This ambivalence gives us food for thought, suggesting that juxtaposition may also involve ‘ideas’ that are ostentatiously different, dissimilar and unrelated (is this possibility not attested by the countless collages, montages and assemblages of modern and contemporary art, which make room for the juxtaposition of diverse, incommensurable and incongruous elements?). Juxtaposition draws them towards one another, brings them into collision, continually shifts their boundaries and prompts dynamic relationships to form between them, yet at the same time marks their mutual heterogeneity.

In this way, the variety of juxtaposition encompasses both what we traditionally call ‘resemblance’ and what we describe as ‘difference’. This claim, however, is too abstract. Juxtaposition is characterised by a radical variety: it is always ‘circumstantial’, always happens within a certain ‘here and now’, and as it appears it withdraws as such, assuming the singular form of the concrete elements being juxtaposed. There is no single given principle of ingenious juxtaposition; nor is there any given plurality of such principles. Ingenuity is, as it were, subject to its own modifying action. Every ingenious juxtaposition is first and foremost the idea for a different principle of juxtaposition.

What form does juxtaposition take within the ‘here and now’ defined by the framework of Atlas Sztuki and the dates 10 September–31 October 2004? The juxtaposition of Krzysztof Skarbek and Laura Pawela’s works, whether we regard it as ingenious or mechanical, constitutes a kind of exhibition machine capable of producing a new meaning for the works brought together, while also setting in motion and driving the thinking of viewers (including the author of this text). Juxtaposing these works undoubtedly means exposing them to a mutual relationship. ‘Juxtaposition’ as ‘exposure to relationship’: it may discover something in the works in question or produce something within them; diminish or excessively emphasise the importance of certain features; redistribute the accents; completely change the articulation of a given work, or even transform it by suggesting hitherto unused interpretative ideas to the viewer. It may lead us to apply issues considered in connection with the male artist’s oeuvre to the female artist’s works, or experimentally to transfer questions arising from the female artist’s work to the male artist’s works. ‘Exposure to relationship’ is therefore always exposure to danger, even if only potentially.

What the juxtaposition of Skarbek and Pawela’s works allows us to see above all is that the motif of juxtaposition itself defines not only the relations between the two artists’ works, but also the internal structure of those works – and does so in a variety of ways. This multiplicity causes the motif of juxtaposition to divide, breaking down into several other motifs whose juxtaposition I shall now attempt to sketch.

Schemas

Skarbek’s art is one great battle against all that is schematic, conventional and routine. It is waged in the name of life’s vitality – a life that is to be free from every form of dying away in the repetition of a particular form and function: ‘what matters to me is that, in this slow race of ours – if I may put it so amusingly – towards death, there should be nothing schematic’². The protagonists of Skarbek’s iconographic universe – people, animals and products of civilisation – attempt to abandon unequivocally determined roles; they ‘continually change their everyday activities. Routine actions […] are replaced with new – often surprising – functions’³. In the artist’s eyes, the civilisation of the modern world seems to define itself as the theatre of a single performance, in which all living beings and things are extras absorbed in fulfilling unequivocally assigned, non-overlapping and necessarily singular functions. As with Le Corbusier, for whom ‘a house is a machine for living in’, ‘an armchair is a machine for sitting in’ and ‘washbasins are machines for washing in’⁴, each thing is a machine with a single purpose. This single functionality is to be guaranteed by a form designed to prevent the ‘perverse’ use of a given product in ways contrary to its intended purpose. Yet it is precisely such a ‘perversion’, often peculiarly poetic, that we find in Skarbek’s paintings. Everything in them exists in a continual process of metaphorical transformation. A given thing loses its assigned function and in exchange acquires a function transferred from another thing or living being. The result is an absurd, thought-provoking and often ingenious juxtaposition of things with different, incongruous and non-functional functions – cars, for example, float through the air, rotate over a fire skewered on a spit, stand on end to form a mountain down which one can ski, or rest outside a house balanced on their bumpers. Repeatedly juxtaposing the same thing with various surprising functions seems to awaken in it the potential to assume every role imaginable.

Individual juxtapositions take place within the space of a universe that is itself one great juxtaposition of elements traditionally separated and opposed to one another: the world of nature, the human world and the world of technological civilisation. Thanks to this ‘paradigmatic’ juxtaposition, Skarbek’s art acquires certain classical features of utopia and the ‘world turned upside down’. Products of technology endowed with their own vitality and subjected to animation, animals friendly towards and collaborating with humans, cities coexisting with an extraordinarily exotic and wild jungle, buildings blossoming with winding electric ornaments – an assemblage of all the worlds mentioned above, lending one another certain traits in order to intensify the vitality of the whole. Juxtapositions of this kind acquire particular clarity in the artist’s collages, although they also become more aggressive there.

Looking at Skarbek’s paintings, however, one cannot resist the thought that the proclaimed struggle against schemas is condemned to continue without end, since schemas are its weapons and also constitute the victor’s trophy. Does the power –

one could even say the vitality – of juxtapositions of different objects with unexpected functions not also arise from their allusive reference to the absent, ‘proper’, conventional functions of those objects? Moreover, these unconventional juxtapositions are based on the use of conventional elements (Skarbek admits that he likes certain schemas, ‘especially those from American action films, dramas or comic books’⁵; here, however, the banal schema acquires a positive, universal value for him, becoming a repository of ‘the eternal truth that everyone needs acceptance, believes in the same values described in all philosophies and religions, and wants to attain happiness, understanding and a sense of self-worth’⁶). Finally, Skarbek’s painted world has developed schemas of its own which – such as those cars forever floating through the air – have inevitably become an easily recognisable emblem, a kind of trademark or the artist’s artistic logo. The paradox of Skarbek’s undertaking is that the ‘struggle against schemas’ is subject to the quasi-mechanical necessity of continual repetition.

In the case of Pawela’s works, one cannot speak of a frontal opposition to the schematic. Instead, we encounter an ostentatious repetition of certain pictorial conventions. In her paintings Pawela imitates the visual conventions characteristic of the Windows interface, juxtaposing them with messages concerning, among other things, reality, being, art, its creation and reception, painting, and various positive and negative emotions. In these ‘computer’ works, the artist appears interested above all in visualising the very idea of juxtaposition and examining its effect: ‘These paintings are a kind of associative operation: the computer sends signals – the human receives them. But what if the computer suddenly sent a message concerning your private life?’⁷. Widespread familiarity with the ‘iconography’ of Windows gives these paintings a high degree of ‘communicativeness’, and those existential messages are therefore relatively easy to decipher. In doing so, one cannot fail to notice that they too are fairly stereotypical and at times even verge on schematic didacticism. As the artist writes in another self-commentary, ‘I painted specific warnings about the dangers arising from the overuse of computer systems, dangersthatweallknowby name; I painted questions about the real world in the virtual age and messages concerning our computerised everyday life’ [emphasis T.Z.]⁸. Among these familiar theses, repeated by everyone to the point of tedium (and often philosophically naive), we find claims that computerised people have lost contact with the real world, that reality is shrinking, that technology has impoverished thought and imagination, that human beings are becoming like machines, and so forth.

It is not enough, then, to say that Pawela ‘reveals’ what everyone already knows. What matters more is how she does so. First, even if we accept that her paintings are merely illustrations of the theses just mentioned, we must acknowledge that they are good illustrations; some works from this series, which has probably already entered its ‘classical’ phase, achieve such a degree of condensation that they might be described as visual aphorisms. Second, schemas ostentatiously repeated and juxtaposed with one another undergo a mutual, discreet disruption. The unified, expressively neutral infrastructure of Windows acquires new meanings, gains an ‘involuntary’ expressiveness and begins to evoke various emotions: depending on the individual juxtaposition, these may include sharp or bitter irony and self-irony, humour, sarcasm, gathering aggression, discouragement, boredom, anxiety and even drama. In turn, the paradigmatic thesis about the schematisation of the computerised person’s behaviour, thought and imagination is perversely undermined by being communicated ingeniously through the same schematic element that is also meant to confirm it. Third, in an obvious and inevitable way, even this ‘discreet disruption’ immediately turns into a schema, Pawela’s artistic emblem. The serial and variational character of the artist’s works, while allowing us to focus on the minor differences between them, nevertheless encourages a revision of the very concept of the schema. Such a revision would take into account the fact that a schema is always embodied, that it exists only in a process of almost imperceptible yet constant modification resulting from its juxtaposition with individual images. Fourth and finally, these images themselves, each in a slightly different way, emphasise the tension generated in juxtapositions of schemas. This tension seems to elude both visualisation and conceptualisation. Metaphorically, one might say it is flexibility itself, enabling schemas to move, be ingeniously juxtaposed and transformed.

Everyday lifeandpersonalrealism

Skarbek perceives everyday life as a sphere of repetitive, routine action, a kingdom of habits and mechanical, monotonous living devoid of new, extraordinary and ‘uncommon’ events. It lacks the intensity and fullness which, the artist seems to believe, should characterise true existence. To him, everyday events and processes appear to be characterised by triviality, by a materiality that refers to no meaning beyond its own arrival and passing. It is against everyday life understood in this way that Skarbek directs his art, which is founded upon the imperative of imagination. In the artist’s own words, in his paintings ‘banal everyday life is transformed into the realisation of dreams of an unforced life, one consistent with the design of an unfettered imagination’⁹. Subjected to a transformation whose principal instrument is the juxtaposition of elements that do not come into contact within routine existence, everyday life begins to reveal its surprising underside, which the artist calls ‘personal realism’: ‘it is the world familiar to everyone, but with each of its elements seen from an extraordinary angle, from a different perspective, anew’¹⁰. We are thus dealing with a kind of immanent philosophy in the sense Breton gave the term: ‘Everything I love, everything I feel, everything that fills my thoughts inclines me towards a particular philosophy, an immanent philosophy which assumes that surreality resides in reality itself, neither superior nor external to it’¹¹. The juxtaposition with the pope of Surrealism also makes us aware of the Romantic and Modernist genealogy of the project for transforming everyday life that Skarbek declares. This is the idea of an art effecting a total ‘defamiliarisation’ of the world, the idea of a state of art encompassing all reality, or, in another version, the idea of an art laboratory in which principles are created that will then shape thought and life. The artist does indeed share this desire for the Promethean radiation of an art that exceeds its autonomy: ‘above all, I would like everything I paint to happen in reality. Perhaps it would only be theatre, but I would encompass the entire city with it’¹². Yet in confronting this profoundly aestheticising desire – in which echoes of revolution through art can be heard¹³ – with the liberal ideal of not violating the freedom of others, Skarbek limits the practical realisation of his undertaking to himself: the whole formed by him and his art is to set an example, offering a different and – I believe – singular possibility of existence¹⁴. Moreover, this art keeps alive the very question of whether the world can be transformed, suggesting that it must be reformulated here and now, when it seems to sound so out of step with the times¹⁵.

The hero of Skarbek’s painterly narratives is invariably the human being, realising desires through an imagination that has the power to act upon reality. This art is therefore anthropological, but also theological, for human power is here an image of divine power understood in a particular way. It is no accident that the figure of Jesus Christ appears in several paintings, always depicted in scenes of performing miracles, in the process of changing the deterministic laws of reality and replacing them with new juxtapositions of things. Skarbek incorporates Christ into his universe because he sees Him as a divine artist who need not resort to the substitute that is painting, but creates His miraculous juxtapositions using the material of everyday life itself, of reality itself. When Skarbek’s paintings are juxtaposed with his declared project, two somewhat dissonant elements can be discerned. The first is the fact that the artist’s unconventional world contains thoroughly conventional, ‘popular’ notions of the attributes of a happy life: obligatorily elegant people dressed in suits and jackets, the presence of a car as a symbol of prosperity, and so forth. This conventional iconography of objects of desire and longing causes the splendour of extraordinary events to be underlaid by gentle irony and a kind of disbelief in the imagination’s creative power. The second element concerns the contrasting, at times spasmodic colours intended to convey the intensity of human desires. Here desire turns away from everyday life, longing for the fullness of life – for a sparkling meaning found in the extraordinary and uncommon. One has the impression that the infinite insatiability of this desire is matched only by the intensity of the lack of meaning that afflicts it.

Ostentatiously repeating the poetics of advertising, Pawela included the slogan ‘Even closer to everyday life’ in the text accompanying her online project Reallaura¹⁶. The artist’s response to the question of everyday life carries echoes of the Dadaist and Pop Art tradition, echoes of twentieth-century attempts to bring art closer to everyday life. This tendency found radical expression in ideas of abolishing art as a relatively autonomous sphere and making it one of the many practices of daily life, of making everyone an artist or making the creation of art an activity as ordinary as feeding the cat or brushing one’s teeth. Yet the present space of possible answers to the question is defined by the conclusions drawn from the failure of all these essentially artistic attempts by art to overcome itself. Thus Pawela’s art does not seek to dissolve art in the immanence of everyday life; instead, it offers an ostentatious repetition of everyday life’s elements.

Ostentatious repetition can be associated with many contemporary artists, so what form does it take in Pawela’s art? The Reallaura project mentioned above is based on the idea of creating images that form a record of events from the artist’s everyday life, using the poetics of mobile-phone displays and the service offered by network operators of ‘downloading’ graphic images known as logos to one’s own telephone. Initially, the project merely imitated the way logos exist and are distributed, taking the form of emails circulated via the Internet¹⁷. After some time they also became real logos, sent for a fee to mobile phones¹⁸, and finally came to encompass the paintings, presented here, that employ the ‘poetics of the mobile phone’. In all these cases, the ‘logo convention’ is used ostentatiously in juxtaposition with the artist’s ‘personal reality’¹⁹. The list of ostentatiously repeated, conventional fragments of everyday life also includes, among other things, purchasing ‘Reallaura’ through a premium-rate text message²⁰; the declamatory, aggressive rhetoric of the text ‘advertising’ the project as a commercial product; the juxtaposition of the artist’s recurrent self-portrait with a verbal ‘legend’, situated at the intersection of billboard advertising, the comic strip, and stylised photographic shots from newspapers and television programmes about national and international celebrities; cultural, gender, cosmetic, dietary, erotic and artistic stereotypes, and so forth; fashions, including the fashion for confessions; and the self-creative, self-promotional and self-marketing character of the entire project. The effect of these repetitions is complex; one should really speak of several effects, overlapping or appearing separately in a given work. It may be an ironic and playful distance from the schema being emphasised, sometimes combined with its self-aware acceptance and consent that it should model the form of a (probably ‘simulated’) event from the artist’s everyday life. In other cases, the emphasis shifts to an attempt to test the internal flexibility of a given schema and to dress an ‘authentic’ fragment of personal everyday life in it. There are also discreet, amusing disruptions of ‘extraordinary’ schemas through their juxtaposition with exceptionally trivial and ordinary events. At other times, finally, the schema is simply filled with neutral content and performs only a phatic function²¹ – serving as a means of contacting the viewer and communicating the message ‘I am’. The purpose of these repetitions is likewise ambiguous. It appears to include an attempt to find a new opportunity for art’s communicativeness; to install it in the contemporary ‘here and now’; to expose the techno-economic conventions of everyday life by using those very conventions, while also using them to establish its own existence (the conventions of self-creation and self-promotion); and finally, to attempt to create a non-naive realism that presents contemporary techniques of existence. What is more, Pawela’s works offer viewers an opportunity to test which schemas are ‘authentic’, which of them we believe in and share with others in a kind of ‘existential community of the schema’ (a phrase full of schemas, hence the quotation marks).

Pawela’s art is sober, free of illusions and conscious of its conditions and possibilities, ‘minimalist’ in the sense that it seeks to inscribe itself within the ‘here and now’, to install itself in everyday life by means of everyday life’s own resources. It is both another fragment of everyday life and its relief; borrowing from the poetics of the works themselves, one might say they display the resolution of everyday life. The latter is not an object in relation to which one might preserve autonomy. It marks our bodies and sets the rhythm of thought. Pawela’s art is not a celebration, cult or phenomenon of everyday life, since all these terms make their object extraordinary, uncommon. This art is one of the events that, each in its own way, persuade us that the ‘meaning of being’ also consists in what is everyday, banal, trivial and conventional, conceived, as far as possible, not in opposition to the extraordinary but in its astonishing simplicity²².

Painting

Skarbek’s works are veritable fireworks. If it were possible, he would undoubtedly paint with fire or streams of light. His shapes are outlined by haloes of burning points, as though seared by the heat of the fullness of life the artist seeks. The key concept here is ‘contrast’. Contrasting juxtapositions of colours and shapes are intended to create the effect of a vibrating image – every plane is woven from dynamic, quivering ornaments. This peculiar form of horrorvacui is in turn contrasted with the decisive cutting of contours: ‘there is no uncertainty in this action – the brush or palette knife marks out the path of thought, like a rally car entering a bend’²³. Yet we must not forget the function performed by what is usually described as formal means, for the artist makes it clear: ‘I am not interested in form for form’s sake in painting; I am not interested in practising compositional tricks’²⁴. For Skarbek, painting – alongside video films, installations and performances, among which it nevertheless appears to take precedence – is the work of creating unconventional juxtapositions of things and functions. These juxtapositions are not confined to the iconographic layer. The transformation of which the artist speaks is also to occur in the juxtaposition of a thing (a car, tram, computer, city and so forth) with the very fabric of painting.

Pawela declares: ‘I am not a painter; it does not touch me; neither colour, nor texture, nor composition constitutes sufficient stimulus for me. It is different with Reality: that stimulates my imagination and propels my thoughts’²⁵. Referring to her ‘computer’ paintings, she stresses that she wanted ‘a powerful juxtaposition of painting and Windows’²⁶. Painting appears to the artist as a fragment of reality, a ready-made object with specific rules of operation. She treats it accordingly, using the functions traditionally ascribed to it – on the one hand, that of being a window through which ‘reality’ can be seen; on the other, that of being a real, material object. Showing Windows windows and mobile-phone logos through the window of the traditional painted image produces a specific reality for these virtual fragments of our landscape, while the canvas, paint and imperfections of manual execution lend them an almost material concreteness. This is particularly apparent in the technologically determined poetics of mobile-phone displays, which, when transferred to painting, lose their technical motivation and acquire a quasi-autonomous existence while also taking on a striking hieratic quality. Paradoxically, painting also brings out (perhaps only by chance) the specific formal elegance of Windows, the ‘techno-designer’ haven found by the aesthetic after it lost its immunity within the sphere of art. On the other hand, the infrastructure of Windows becomes an instrument for the ironic declamation of certain stereotypical, ‘self-referential’ problems connected with the creation and reception of painting and art in general.

Technology

In Skarbek’s work, the motif of life’s vitality remains in continual conflict with the existence of the technological world. Juxtapositions of the latter with the natural and human worlds always result in products of civilisation being endowed with the characteristics of living beings, never the reverse. Elements of the technological world threaten human beings, for not only do they make them machine-like by determining and schematising their existence, but they also cease to be tools and become ends in themselves. They take on mythical features and generate around themselves a quasi-religious cult that ought to be reserved for the living. Thus in Skarbek’s paintings ‘people take civilisation into their own hands and change it, knocking various threatening-trivial objects from its arsenal, such as the car, television, refrigerator, telephone or the entire urban landscape. They have to “knock” all of them out of their basic functions’²⁷. Civilisation and technology alienate human beings and separate them from the immanence of life, providing substitutes for it, dead prostheses. This is undoubtedly the source of the artist’s fondness for the motif of human ‘primitiveness’. The fanciful use made of technological products in Skarbek’s paintings has something of the post-civilisational neo-tribalism characteristic of films such as Mad Max, made in the 1980s. By juxtaposing Windows windows with existential messages, Pawela – as she herself notes, somewhat perversely – became ‘a system communicating to my surroundings what I dislike, what my problems, dilemmas and questions are in relation to myself and the art I create’²⁸. For the artist, juxtaposing the human and technological worlds is a natural interdependence, while the computer is simply another technology modulating another, new space of being. By focusing on the graphic framework of Windows and emphasising the low, ‘grainy’ resolution of the ‘mobile’ images, Pawela presents the technological modes of presentation themselves, of entering into presence. She presents the various forms assumed by the techneof being²⁹. Her works are techno-existential.

Generations

As Benjamin wrote, ‘the idea of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the idea of redemption. The same applies to the idea of the past, which history makes its concern. The past bears within it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. […] there is a secret agreement between past generations and our own. Our coming was expected on Earth. Like every generation before us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. This claim cannot easily be dismissed’³⁰. Could one not say, paradoxically, that Pawela, an artist of the ‘younger generation’ (to whom all messianism appears foreign), by juxtaposing different schemas in unexpected and ingenious ways, to some extent fulfils the quasi-messianic hopes of Skarbek, an artist of the ‘middle generation’?

1. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, trans. B. J. Gawecki, Warsaw 1955, vol. 1, pp. 197–198. I give the English terms after J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., London 1948; I have also modified Gawecki’s translation by rendering wit as ‘ingenuity’.
2. A Private Conversation with Krzysztof Skarbek, [in:] Krzysztof Skarbek. She greeted me with that cleverlysunnyfacethatImyselfpainted, exhibition catalogue, BWA Gallery of Contemporary Art in Legnica, Legnica 1992, p. 9.
3. K. Skarbek, Paintings of Personal Realism, [in:] Krzysztof Skarbek.Paintings of PersonalRealism: Painting and Video Art, exhibition catalogue, Galeria na Solnym in Wrocław and the Art Gallery in Legnica, Wrocław 2002, p. 3.
4. Le Corbusier, Eyes,ThatDoNot See…, trans. E. Grabska, [in:] ArtistsonArt.FromvanGoghtoPicasso, eds E. Grabska and H. Morawska, Warsaw 1969, pp. 233–234; one might wonder what piece of furniture Le Corbusier would have considered a ‘machine for having sex’, and what a ‘machine for thinking’.
5. A PrivateConversationwithKrzysztofSkarbek, op. cit., p. 9.
6. Ibid.
7. Reallauraordownloadmeto yourmobile, Cybercore #, http://cybercore/republika.pl/cc6/cc6.pdf, p. 4.
8. L. Pawela, Can’tgototherealworld, http://laurapawela.republika.pl/obrazytekst.htm, p. 2.
9. K. Skarbek, Paintings of Personal Realism, op. cit., p. 6.

10. Ibid., p. 3.
11. A. Breton, SurrealismandPainting, trans. Z. Bieńkowski, [in:] ArtistsonArt.FromvanGoghtoPicasso, eds E. Grabska and H. Morawska, op. cit., p. 431.
12. A PrivateConversationwithKrzysztofSkarbek, op. cit., p. 9.
13. It is worth mentioning that in the second half of the 1980s Skarbek was loosely associated with the happenings of Wrocław’s Orange Alternative.

14. ‘I would not like to change the world myself, but I would like people to want to change themselves and everything around them. […] To a certain extent I try to identify with those people (the protagonists of my paintings and films). Yet I try to preserve my own freedom and not threaten the freedom of others. Only as long as my freedom, expressed through my work, does not threaten the freedom of others do I have the courage to act like my protagonists. Most often, however, the terrain on which I transform reality is my flat or studio; here I do not interfere with anyone else’s freedom. It seems to me that art and life cannot be separated. They form a certain whole. This consists of the sum of artistic achievements, but also encounters with people, clothing, hairstyle, behaviour – in other words, one’s attitude towards people – as well as spiritual expression itself, including exercise, dance and play.’ A PrivateConversationwithKrzysztofSkarbek, op. cit., pp. 9–10.
15. Taking into account the historical conditions of Skarbek’s art, the following paradoxical observation suggests itself. Skarbek’s human being struggles against everyday life because it condemns him to the routine of living according to a single, schematic role; the source of this motif can, with some probability, be sought in the grey, monotonous and deterministically ordered daily life of the final years of the Polish People’s Republic, to which Skarbek’s paintings, exploding with colour and flaunting the extraordinary, were a response. Breaking free from the standardisation imposed above all by work, Skarbek’s human being is a kind of hobbyist who takes up various activities without allowing any of them to determine his essence. An analogous motif of unforced, non-alienating work-as-creation – and at the same time an excellent paraphrase of Skarbek’s paintings – can be found in Marx and Engels, who write that when ‘labour begins to be divided, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape; he is a hunter, fisherman or shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood – whereas in communist society, where nobody has an exclusive sphere of activity but can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, tend cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner – in short, to do whatever I happen to wish without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic’ (K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, trans. K. Błeszyński, [in:] K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, Warsaw 1961, vol. 3, p. 35). The paradox and irony of history lie in the fact that what was an ideal of imaginary communism, an unrealisable dream under real communism, has become under present-day capitalism not so much a possibility or freedom as a necessity. Today one must have many occupations and play many social roles, particularly if one wants to be a ‘critical critic’, which, as Marx and Engels rightly point out, one can only be ‘after dinner’…
16. See http://free.art.pl/bardzo/reallaura/; strictly speaking, the term ‘project’ does not entirely fit Reallaura because of its openness to what is undesigned, to the eventfulness of everyday life.

17. See ibid.
18. See http://reallaura.smsbox.pl/

19. http://free.art.pl/bardzo/reallaura/info.htm

20. Such a text message costs PLN 2.44, which probably makes each individual instalment of the mobile Reallaura the cheapest work of art currently available in Poland; the sum also includes the cost of delivery to the buyer.

21. See U. Eco, The AbsentStructure, trans. A. Weinsberg and P. Bravo, Warsaw 2003, p. 195.

22. See J.-L. Nancy, Lesensdumonde, Paris 1993, p. 36.

23. K. Skarbek, Paintingsof PersonalRealism, op. cit., p. 5.

24. A PrivateConversationwithKrzysztofSkarbek, op. cit., p. 9.

25. L. Pawela, Can’tgototherealworld, op. cit., p. 3.

26. L. Pawela, XProblems, http://laurapawela.republika.pl/obrazytekst.htm, p. 1.
27. A PrivateConversationwithKrzysztofSkarbek, op. cit., p. 10.
28. L. Pawela,XProblems, op. cit., p. 1.

29. On the techne of existence, see J.-L. Nancy, LesMuses, Paris 1994, p. 68.

30. W. Benjamin, Onthe Concept ofHistory, trans. K. Krzemieniowa, [in:] W. Benjamin, Angelof History.Essays,Sketches,Fragments, 1996, p. 414.