This 1936 album of the utmost rarity—one of only two known extant copies—offers a fascinating perspective on the critical exchange between the Russian and Polish avant-gardes. Opening with a vintage photograph of Malevich (an enlarged fragment of a photograph taken of Malevich and artist peers at GINKhUK [Petrograd State Institute of Artistic Culture]), the album is distinguished by an original four-color lithograph by Strzemiński, composed in Malevich’s “Suprematist style.” The following pages contain twenty-five lithographs made by Strzemiński’s students after Malevich’s canonical portfolio 34 Drawings (1920/21), a series that Strzemiński knew firsthand from the Soviet Union and of which he likely had a copy. The 34 Drawings portfolio had great resonance in Poland, where elements were reproduced in magazines such as Blok and Forma, and it served as an inspiration for many artists’ works, including Mieczysław Szczuka’s photomontages of the 1920s. The album concludes with ten vintage photographs of Malevich’s Architectons. Presenting his Suprematist ideals in three dimensions, Malevich’s Architectons were highly influential as both sculpture and architecture, understood as avant-garde art objects and as blueprints for a new urbanism. During his trip to Warsaw in 1927, Malevich left one of his Architectons (“Zeta”) with the architect couple Helena and Szymon Syrkus in Łódź, allowing Strzemiński and his students close access to this example. In the album, five of the Architecton photographs were made from the few existing reproductions in Polish journals at the time (such as those in the 1926 issue of Praesens), and five were directly printed from negatives. According to Strzemiński’s letters, Malevich sent him these negatives of his Architecton images in about 1930 or 1931. Combined from these elements, this album—an unusual pedagogical exercise—highlights the means of distribution that facilitated the circulation of Malevich’s progressive ideas among Polish Constructivists and is extraordinary testament to the artist’s long-lasting influence.

This artist’s book was acquired for the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in 2012 after Magdalena Moskalewicz undertook a research trip to Łódź in Poland to examine the other known copy, which is held in the collection of Muzeum Sztuki Łódź (established through the efforts of Strzemiński and his peers as early as 1931). The Łódź copy differs in details. It was executed with different paper and features another portrait of Malevich (a larger frame taken from the same original photograph) on its first page as well as a slightly different order of lithographs. These particularities speak to the level of freedom that Strzemiński might have given his students in the execution of the album. The copy acquired by MoMA once belonged to one of those students, the artist Samuel Szczekacz (Zur), who left Łódź for Belgium, and later Palestine, just before the outbreak of World War II, saving the book from possible destruction.

The new acquisition was exhibited at MoMA immediately, in the exhibition Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925 (December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013). A few years earlier, the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books acquired another book designed by Strzemiński, together with Katarzyna Kobro, a collection of poems Z ponad (From above, 1930) by a Polish avant-garde poet Julian Przyboś. Together these two books establish an important bridge between the Museum’s growing knowledge of Polish modern art and MoMA’s renowned collection of Russian avant-garde material.

The post “Kazimierz Malewicz 1876–1935” by Władysław Strzemiński: Artist’s Book as Hommage appeared first on post.

Following in the footsteps of MoMA’s founding director, 10 members of C-MAP’s Central and Eastern European group spent five memorable days in Moscow in June 2015. The trip complemented the group’s growing interest in Russian art over the past year. While in Moscow, we visited 13 institutions—museums, private foundations, and commercial galleries—and had meetings with dozens of individuals, including artists, writers, collectors, archivists, educators, curators, and museum professionals, who narrated a deep and rich history of modern and contemporary Russian art, with particular emphasis on artistic movements since 1960. Highlights included attending the inaugural opening of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Rem Koolhaas; meeting with Zelfira Tregulova, the director of the State Tretyakov Gallery; visiting the studio of artist and unofficial-art magazine editor Igor Shelkovsky; and touring the late 1920s house of avant-garde architect Konstantin Melnikov. Five days were barely enough time. Between meetings and tours, the group took in breathtaking sunsets over the Moscow River, ate delicious traditional Russian meals of pelmeni (meat-filled dumplings) and borscht, and walked the city’s streets, marveling at the eclectic mixture of Neo-classical, Constructivist, and Brutalist architecture. While getting stuck in traffic on the overcrowded boulevards and bridges is an integral part of the Moscow experience, we did not miss the chance to explore the elaborately designed, extremely clean and efficient Moscow Metro. The group returned to New York with about 50 books to add to MoMA’s library and with recordings of interviews that we conducted with artists in Moscow. They will be published soon, here on post.

Barr visited Moscow at a pivotal time in the history of the city and the Soviet Union—just 10 years after the Russian Revolution and only a few years before Socialist Realism was decreed as the official style of Soviet art and literature. The C-MAP Central and Eastern European group has increased its research and programming of Russian art at an equally critical time. Russia today is at the center of several international conflicts, and the effects of this involvement can be felt in art and culture in Moscow. Maintaining C-MAP’s commitment to understanding the historical imperatives and changing conditions of an increasingly global art world, the group will continue its studies of Russian art.

Ksenia Nouril

0. PROLOGUE

Views of Moscow

Moscow Musings

By Jon Hendricks

Many years ago, I bought an artwork in Denmark by Stanley Brouwn. It is titled Path and was “a project for USSR.” It is 600 x 70 centimeters, graphite on acidic paper that is now crumbling and tearing in spots. Brouwn drew two parallel lines that extend for a while from the left of the sheet, then jut up a bit, and finally continue onto the right toward the end of the paper. What a stunning work for the world’s largest nation! A six- meter “path.” There is no location indicated for this path and no indication of what the path is to be made of, but I sure would like to walk on this “path” in either direction—left to right or right to left; north to south or east to west.

For a number of years our C-MAP group at MoMA has been studying and traveling to Central and Eastern Europe, but somehow avoiding Russia. RUSSIA! The land of Constructivism, Agit Prop, Stravinsky, Gogol, Pavlova, Nijinsky, Goncharova, Popova, Rozanova, Stepanova, Udaltsova, Larionov, Malevich, Tatlin, Kandinsky, Puni, Berliok, Mayakovsky, Rodchenko, Gabo, El Lissitzky, Suetin—the land of ideas and innovation, hopefulness, and vision.

We are studying the post-war avant-garde. Each country has its own vocabulary, its own needs for a new art that is defined by that culture and its peoples. We can’t be judges—only observers. If we can be open and not prejudge or artificially compare, we have a chance of seeing and learning. As La Monte Young told me in a different context: “Listen and observe. ”It’s hard to do. We find what we are looking for, but we have trouble uncovering what’s in front of us.

So we went to Moscow for five days, more or less, and took a fleeting stroll, about the length of Stanley Brouwn’s Path, in Russia. We saw old and very old art, and new art. We met extraordinary artists, thinkers, curators, art historians, and museum directors. Let me say, Moscow is an extremely beautiful city that cares greatly for its past, for its architectural history, but it is also a city moving into its future. I was very impressed by its care for memory, perhaps obscuring some, but presenting it all the same.

We went looking for insight into parallels to our own avant-garde of the 1960s and ‘70s, and to those of other Central and Eastern European countries that we had been studying, discovering what we, as an institution, had missed and overlooked. Could we find enlightenment in five days? Could we see or at least sense what was not on our itinerary? We met some great artists, but then had to move on, hardly having time to catch our breath or for the artists to express their ideas. We spoke English and hardly gave a second thought to the fact that almost all those we met spoke English back to us. We asked to see what we wanted to see but were hardly open to what might appear by chance or accident.

To be continued . . . .

Jon Hendricks
New York City, August 27, 2015

1. CENTER OF MOSCOW

Meeting with artist Igor Shelkovsky

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

It took us a while to find the way to the studio of Igor Shelkovsky among the entrances to local stores on Gogolevsky Boulevard, across the street from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. After we finally found the right door and made our way to the 4th floor, we were welcomed into a large, bright space by a tall, strong man with white hair, intensely blue eyes, and an elegant demeanor. The studio was filled with Shelkovsky’s work: small-scale geometric wooden sculptures, mostly white, were resting on numerous tables, on shelves, and directly on the floor. The walls were crowded with other wooden structures, this time flatter and black, and abstract paintings of various shapes, each filed with stripes of white, green, red and blue—the artist’s proposition for a new Russian flag, as we learned later. Among this abundance of art objects, on the table closest to the entrance, lay a pile of papers: documents, bound photocopies, and original publications with the familiar Cyrillic letters “a-Я” immediately recognizable on their covers.

These were the eight issues of the art magazine A-YA that Shelkovsky published in Paris from 1979 to 1986, the primary reason for our visit. At a time of limited information exchange between East and West, every issue of this periodical—published in 3000 copies in Russian and English, with an insert of French-language summaries—provided a unique source of knowledge about the Russian contemporary art scene. It was A-YA that first acquainted Western audiences with the work of artists such as Ilya Kabakov or Eric Bulatov, and the critic Boris Groys.

Without much prompting, Shelkovsky began telling us how the magazine was produced. The contents of A-YA were based on materials smuggled out of the Soviet Union by various trusted travellers to the West. An underground editorial office was active in Moscow, in the person of Alexander Sidorov, who conducted the initial selection and made sure the texts and images reached Shelkovsky in Paris. (Sidorov appeared in the magazine under the pseudonym Alex Alexejev, to avoid prosecution.) A-YA cost 10 francs in France, where it was circulated via subscription, while another collaborator and compatriot, Alexander Kosolapov, distributed it in New York. Most importantly, however, Shelkovsky presented it for free to anyone traveling to the USSR, where A-YA was extremely popular in the art circles. While the culture of literary samizdats was flourishing in Moscow at the time, art-focused magazines were virtually non-existent when Shelkovsky was leaving for France in 1976. A-YA filled that void. That’s what’s incredible about the magazine: It wasn’t simply a publication about Soviet contemporary art made for the Western audience. The first of the set of goals stated in the first issue’s editorial was, in fact: “To acquaint Russian artists —in and outside Russia—with each others’ work.” The authors and the primary readers of A-YA were largely the same Russian crowd, but their own periodical could only reach them after a huge detour, via France.

Our host told us that the KGB made sure to inform all the known Moscow-based contributors that they were engaging in a dangerous, capitalist enterprise funded by the CIA. (In fact, Shelkovsky had to fundraise and sell other artist’s works to fund the periodical, after the initial funding, from a private collector, fell though just after the first issue.) But Igor Shelkovsky lost his Soviet passport only after he released the special literature issue, published only in Russian, which came out after A-YA #6 (without a number of its own). Socialist states of the former Eastern Europe are known for having imposed much stronger censorship on the written word than they did on visual arts, and this case was no exception. “The government wasn’t that interested in images or music,” Shelkovsky explained. “It wanted to control the thoughts of the people.”

The last issue of A-YA was published in 1986, and Shelkovsky got his passport back during Perestroika. When years later he released an almanac of the magazine—all 8 issues bound together—the 1,000 copies sold out immediately. Today, Shelkovsky credits A-YA with raising art consciousness in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. “You have to understand,” Shelkovsky explained to us, “my generation of artists did not know anything about Russian art. We did not know anything about Western art. We started from nothing.”

Visit to the Konstantin Melnikov House

By Juliet Kinchin

During a previous visit to Moscow, I peered through a fence and overgrowth at this avant-garde masterpiece, which, like so many other Constructivist buildings of the late 1920s, was obviously in a sad state of disrepair. Today, the stucco exterior is still cracked and patched, and wrangles over the Melnikov estate and archive are evidently still ongoing, but there has been a turn for the better since the city took over the day-to-day care of this precious architectural structure. Ambitious plans to preserve, research, and publicize the property are under way. And what a joy finally to get inside! Expertly guided by the director, Pavel Kuznetsov, and architectural custodian Elizabeta Lihacheva, who since childhood has been familiar with the house and the Melnikov family, we were given privileged access to all its nooks and crannies.

This extraordinary manifesto of modern living, like the contemporaneous Rietveld-Schröder House in Utrecht, is modest in scale and located on an otherwise unprepossessing street. The environs have changed since Melnikov’s day. The neighboring church on which Melnikov deliberately trained a view from his interior is now long gone, and with it the visual echo of the Melnikov’s interlocking cylindrical volumes with those of a traditional ecclesiastical structure. From the roof terrace it is hard to imagine away the overbearing presence of a pumped-up block of luxury apartments next door. But Melnikov’s radical exercise in economic construction—using as few bricks as possible and piercing the exterior with strange hexagonal windows—still holds its own. The peppering of windows combined with the dramatic glazing of the double-height studio above the entrance really opens up the internal spaces. At the same time, one can see why El Lissitzky had a problem with this somewhat Art Deco spin on Constructivism—perhaps feeling that Melnikov had been overexposed to decadent forms of modernism at the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationales des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes while erecting the USSR pavilion there. Inside, the curved exterior walls create oddly shaped spaces, but one can sense the underlying grasp of an engineer’s or craftsman’s intuitive understanding of the technical and load-bearing aspects of the design and features, like the hand-built Constructivist stove. It was fascinating to see a couple of the windows opened up.

The house was one of the few homes that remained private in Soviet times. It was preserved by Melnikov’s son, Viktor, also an artist, who died in 2006. Even knowing this, I was unprepared for the extent to which the contents have survived, all now bearing inventory tags: solid bourgeois furniture (including a kitchen cabinet given as a wedding present by Melnikov’s in-laws); a mauve Art Nouveau carpet that set the color scheme of the double-height studio; the white wool dress coat Mrs Melnikov acquired in Paris and two of Melnikov’s beautifully preserved hats; a clunky, rusting film projector in the basement, so redolent of the avant-garde fascination with film; a bust of Homer above the telephone in the stairwell. Thankfully, such artworks and furnishings from two generations have not been purged in a futile attempt to recreate an aura of “authentic” purity. In line with revisionist views of modernism, the curators are keen to emphasize the combination of avant-garde and traditional elements at work; they do not hesitate to describe the Melnikovs as coming from god-fearing, bourgeois-peasant stock. The term “iconic” seems doubly relevant in view of the house’s spiritual aura—the glowing yellow walls of the bedroom, apparently once gilded, give one the impression of walking right into an icon painting or Russian Orthodox interior. At the same time, the yellow and blue triangles on the ceilings of the boy’s and girl’s rooms reminded me of Vilmos Huszaàr’s designs for children’s rooms and the strong links between De Stijl and Russian Constructivism. Documents and vintage photographs from a recently discovered trove in the house are integrated in the displays throughout. It was exciting to see the house at a time of such rich new discoveries.

Visit to Galerie Iragui

Artist Nikita Alekseev at Galerie Iragui

Meeting with artist Yuri Albert at Stella Art Foundation

By Sara Bodinson

On the third day of our Moscow visit, the group ventured to the Stella Art Foundation, which was established to promote cultural exchange, support Russian art and young artists, and establish a contemporary art museum. There we met Yuri Albert, an artist from the second generation of the Moscow Conceptual School, to see an exhibition of his work. Aptly titled I Need To Tell You So Much with My Art, the exhibition featured several works that, in Albert’s words, continue his investigation of several related questions: What is the content of abstract painting—or any works of art, for that matter? What does an artist mean or what is he or she able to tell through abstraction? What do viewers see in it?” In the main gallery hung several large white canvases with prompts written at the bottom stating, in Russian and English, “After viewing this picture, please sign and date it.” Already quite full of signatures—including a slash that one woman insisted represented her signature—the canvases playfully and critically evolved into a collectively authored work.

Another gallery featured a work comprised of more than a dozen small, black paintings that at first glance appeared abstract. Upon closer inspection (and in just the right light), sighted visitors could see that the canvases were printed with braille. Albert said the texts were excerpts from Vincent van Gogh’s letters describing his paintings to his brother, but that only blind visitors would be able to know this. He said that he develops many of his works with an ideal audience in mind. However, he noted that in this and many of his other works, any audience is missing some aspect of the work and its meaning: sighted visitors cannot read the braille descriptions, but visitors who are blind cannot see Van Gogh’s original paintings.

After leading us through the exhibition, Albert presented an overview of his work beginning in the 1970s, including one work in which he advertised his availability to perform chores or other small domestic jobs for people he knew. Participants filled out a work request and then, using photography, documented him executing the task.

Tour of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA)

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

The library of the Moscow Art Museum is a researcher’s dream and is newly accessible to the public. It is housed in an all-white, perfectly orderly room filled with tall bookshelves that glow with the colorful covers of the volumes they hold. Our visit to the library completed our tour of MMOMA, which started with the exhibition Fortune Museum, a show celebrating the museum’s 15th anniversary and featuring works from the collection. Initially conceived to focus on art from Western Europe and the U.S., MMOMA now includes contemporary art from Russia in its programming and acquisitions, a policy change that was reflected in the exhibition. In Fortune Museum we saw works by Igor Shelkovsky, Irina Korina, Vadim Zakharov, and Haim Sokol, who were among the artists we met in Moscow. Other artists, such as Boris Orlov, Igor Mukhin, and Olga Chernysheva, were familiar to us from their works in MoMA’s collection. The exhibition was introduced by poetic phrases hidden in fortune cookies given out at the entrance, but we were doubly fortunate to have as our guides the show’s curator, MMOMA director Vasili Tsereteli, and his team. We toured the galleries and impressive open storage spaces, learning about the museum’s history and mission from Tsereteli, grandson of the museum’s founding director, artist Zurab Tsereteli. We enjoyed lunch with our hosts in MMOMA’s café, where monumental bronze reliefs depicting erotic mythological scenes are framed by colorful modernist mosaics designed for the museum by Zurab Tsereteli, who is currently president of the Russian Academy of Arts.

Visit to the Ostengruppe Studio

By Juliet Kinchin

Meeting with artists Dmitri Gutov and Haim Sokol and scholar Ekaterina Degot

Tour of the Multimedia Art Museum Moscow (MAMM)

By Sara Bodinson

One morning the group visited the Multimedia Art Museum Moscow (MAMM), a state museum founded in 2010 to introduce Russian audiences to both contemporary art and multimedia technologies. We saw a diverse array of exhibitions, including the first Robert Capa retrospective in Russia as well as exhibitions of war photography, fashion photography, and solo exhibitions of work by Herb Ritts and Joseph Kosuth. We were guided by Anna Zaytseva, chief curator and deputy director of MAMM, who, prior to her tenure at the museum, worked with Joseph Backstein on the first few iterations of the Moscow Biennial. She highlighted her work with contemporary artists to activate the museum’s atrium, which cuts through several floors of galleries, where recently Rebecca Horn had developed an installation visible from all floors.

We then retreated to the office of MAMM director Olga Sviblova to look at some of the museum’s rich holdings from the museum’s collection of photographs, including a number of vintage prints by Alexandr Rodchenko and Max Penson.

Meeting with artist Taus Makhacheva and curator Joseph Backstein

2. GORKY PARK AND AROUND

Scenes from the Garage Museum Opening

Archives exhibition at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

By Michelle Elligott

The Sixties: Points of Intersection, a project by Garage Teens Team

By Sara Bodinson

One of the highlights of the inaugural exhibition program at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art’s new building was The Sixties: Points of Intersection. This beautifully designed and engaging exhibition was the result of two years of research conducted by the Garage Teens Team. This group, comprised of high school seniors and first year university students interested in contemporary art, attends lectures, visits exhibitions, writes, and hosts tours. For this project, they focused their research on the study of five characters from the period of the Khruschchev Thaw: Nonconformist, Student, Worker, Woman, Scientist, Architect. Of these characters, the teens wrote, “We were guided by two ideas: first, this selection really conveys the spirit of the era; and second, the era itself chose them as its heroes.”

In collaboration with the Multimedia Art Museum of Moscow, the teens produced a video that posed questions about their own relationship to the 1960s through the lens of these characters. Their insights were informed by interviews they conducted with people who had experienced the 1960s and by researching these characters through music, literature, and films from the decade. Each character had its own display of related resources and ephemera, smartly designed to match each persona. Throughout the run of the exhibition, representatives from the Garage Teens Team led tours of the exhibition in Russian and English.

Scenes from theTeens Team’s exhibition at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

Meeting with artist Olga Chernysehva

By Ksenia Nouril

While in Moscow, we met with the artist Olga Chernysheva and were able to ask her questions about her film The Train (2003), which is part of MoMA’s collection. Reflecting on why she made the film, Chernysheva said, “I really wanted to see the train as a technical material, as a machine . . . like an organism . . . a living being.” Over several months, she shot hours of footage, walking through train cars with a hand-held camera. What she told us that was most surprising is that the film was almost never made. “I had all of this material, but I didn’t know what to do with it,” she said. Then on one of her journeys, she crossed paths with the rhapsodist (bard) who features prominently in this seven-minute film. He appears almost out of nowhere—down on his luck, traveling the rails reciting poetry for spare change. Chernysheva was fascinated by this man, who, she claimed, “saved” her film. She was impressed by how he humbly bridged high art and everyday life through his recitation of an early and little-known poem by the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin on a crowded commuter train. Capturing this moment was very important to Chernysheva because “The Train is not about traveling, but about being. For me traveling is about moving from point A to point B, but the film is about looking around at where you are. Even after the train leaves the picture, we remain.”

Tour of Fallen Monuments Park in Gorky Park

Meeting with artist Andrei Monastyrski

Tour of the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

At the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val, or the New State Tretyakov Gallery, which is the part of the larger State Tretyakov Gallery dedicated to art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we met with director Zelfira Tregulova and curator Kirill Svetlyakov. Upon entering the permanent collection, we were stunned by the colors in the paintings of the early 20th-century Russian neoprimitivists. Yes, we had all seen works by Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova in books and slides, and some of us had actually encountered one or two of their paintings in museums, but the richness of color that hit us in the first two rooms of the New Tretyakov left us breathless. We were lucky to have Svetlyakov as our guide, as he introduced each work and told us about the early reception of this group of painters, known collectively as the Jack of Diamonds and later as the Moscow Cezannists. Surprisingly, four rooms farther on, even the celebrated Black Square, by the group’s most prominent member, Kazimir Malevich, seemed to be full of color: red and green tones lurked behind the fading black surface, which was covered with a web of craquelure.

In the room where Malevich’s later, figurative work was shown, Svetlyakov explained that after 1932, the museum’s avant-garde holdings were hidden away in storage. Within just a few years, Socialist Realism had replaced avant-garde painting and sculpture both in artists’ studios and in Soviet exhibition halls. This dramatic, imposed shift in artistic orientation was apparent in the exhibition’s narrative. Stepping from one room into the next—from the intimate scale and intellectual focus of Constructivist pieces to the inflated glory of pretentious but technically ingenious canvases of the Socialist Realists—felt like landing on a different planet.

Meeting with artists Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina

By Ksenia Nouril

Artists Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina, key figures of the Moscow Conceptual School, joined us at the New State Tretyakov Gallery. They guided us through their special project Analysis of Art, which was installed in the galleries dedicated to Socialist Realism. This placement within the history of official Soviet art was strategic, although we found it very ironic, since the artists are well known for their work in unofficial art circles of the 1970s and ’80s. In the first room of their exhibition, we saw works from their series Mushrooms of the Russian Avant-Garde. Combining mysticism and modernism, this series remixes many recognizable works, such as Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–1920) and Malevich’s Black Square (1915), which we had just seen on our tour of the New Tretyakov. The installation also made direct reference to the centenary of the Black Square. In the second room of their exhibition, Makarevich and Elagina interspersed several vitrines featuring materials and apparatuses of other artists and other craftsmen. Particularly clever are their conceptual plays on words. For example, the stenciled Russian letters УНОК appear in a floating frame filled with rice, or “рис” in Russian. While “УНОК” is a nonsense word—perhaps referencing the famous Russian avant-garde school UNOVIS—the two words together make up the word “рисунок,” or “drawing.” By means of this subtle engagement with language, Makarevich and Elagina introduce a self-reflexive meditation on the life and work of artists.

Scenes from Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina’s exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val

Meeting with artists Dima Vilensky and Olga Egorova of the group Chto Delat? and scholar Ilya Budraitskis

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

“Education is impossible without entertainment,” asserts the collective Chto Delat?, with a nod to Bertolt Brecht. On a windy afternoon we met with Dmitry Vilensky and Olga Egorova, two of the 10 artists and activists who make up this group, which formed in St. Petersburg in 2003. They began by explaining that Chto Delat? models its artistic and political inquiries on the Brechtian triangle of speculation and critique, aesthetic pleasure, and political engagement. Their work is often embodied in films, actions, and newspapers. Today, it is circulated largely via the Internet, but before the era of widespread digital connectivity, the collective engaged a lot with radio.

Chto Delat? means “What is to be done?” or “What to do?” Although the name is usually associated with Lenin’s famous pamphlet of the same title, Vilensky and Egorova told us that it actually comes from a 19th-century novel by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, from whom Lenin borrowed it in the first place.

Together, we watched excerpts of Chto Delat?’s Tower Songspiel (2010), the final piece in a video trilogy of socially engaged musicals that addresses current political issues with the theatrical means employed by Brecht. The music was still reverberating in our heads as we left for lunch, where we discussed the role of art activism in Russia today. Ilya Budraitskis’s essay on the topic, which provided the basis for our conversation, is published soon on post.

Meeting with artist Vadim Zakharov

Meeting with artist Arseniy Zhilyaev and scholar Keti Chukhrov at the Strelka Institute

3. OUTSIDE MOSCOW

Visit to Regina and XL Galleries at Winzavod

By Ksenia Nouril

Winzavod, or the wine factory, is an epicenter for contemporary art in Moscow. Built in the late 19th century as a brewery, the complex later served as a winery and since 2007 has been home to numerous galleries, design boutiques, educational spaces, and cafes. We visited Regina Gallery and XL Gallery there and met with several artists. At Regina, Anna Parkina showed us a selection of her iconic collages, which were composed from colored paper and photographs, as well as her more recent collaged sculptures, in which she applied the same technique to abstract, three-dimensional forms. Viktor Alimpiev shared one of his films with us. Having seen his meticulously orchestrated works at various international biennials, we made the most of this opportunity to ask him questions about his process and production. On view at Regina were 60 portraits of Moscow artists, curators, dealers, and collectors by Alexey Kallima, who is best known for his light-hearted, brightly-colored, large-scale, neo-expressionist paintings. At XL Gallery, Irina Korina spoke to us about her major works, including Chapel, which she made for the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2013. While her installations and sculptures address serious and even controversial social and political issues in post-Soviet Russia, Korina has not lost her sense of humor. For a past project, she made and wore a larger-than-life head of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. She appeared in this full-body costume at the Lenin Library in Moscow as well as outside Moscow at Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, where she attracted crowds with her performative sculpture.

Visit to the V-A-C Foundation (VICTORIA — The Art of Being Contemporary)

Visit to the Smirnov and Sorokin Foundation Studios

The post From the Red Square to the Black Square: Memos from Moscow appeared first on post.

The artist presented the materials sent to him via NET, first in his apartment—at the gathering that was shut down by security police, with grim consequences for the attendants—and then, in the gallery Akumulatory 2 that he ran in Poznań from 1972 to 1989. NET allowed for a relatively unconstrained exchange of information and art ephemera at the time of limited mobility. As a result, Kozłowski received publications from around the world: Art & Language journal and Schmuck from England, Art and Project Bulletin from Holland, Avalanche from the US, or FILE from Canada, to name just a few. For many years, he corresponded with artists based in five continents (Mieko Shiomi and Yutaka Matsusava in Japan; Emmett Williams and Richard Long in the US; Ben Vautier, Hanne Darboven, Endre Tot and Petr Stembera in Europe; Peter Kennedy and Elwyn Lynn in Australia; Angelo de Aquino and Felipe Ehrenberg in Latin America, among many others) and the acquaintances often led to exhibitions in the gallery Akumulatory 2. For example, his letter exchange with George Maciunas inspired the first Fluxus event organized in Poland: the four-day long “Fluxus Festival” where local artists performed known Fluxus works, in 1977.

A prolific artist working with artists’ books, drawing, performance and later also installation art and painting, Kozłowski himself was not allowed to travel abroad as a result of his “anti-state” activity (as the security police understood his worldwide engagement), but he still exhibited in Poland and internationally. Similarly, Kozłowski was prohibited from teaching at the Poznań School of Fine Arts, and delegated to library work, only to be elected Dean of the school on the wave of changes introduced by Solidarity, in 1981. Since then, he has taught generations of art students in Poland and abroad. Today, Kozłowski is considered Poland’s most influential conceptual artist, although his practice goes far beyond orthodox conceptualism.

In this interview, conducted when Jarosław Kozłowski visited MoMA to meet with C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe, the artist speaks about the past challenges of communicating across the Iron Curtain, his continuing fascination with language as an art medium as well as what he sees as the danger of a solely political reading of art.

Chapter 1: “Shared Language”

In the first part of the conversation, the artist discuss his interest in the phenomenon of language as a tool to perceive the world; the interest that gave birth to many of the artist’s books that Kozłowski has created since the 1970s.

Chapter 2: “Art Communication in East and West”

Kozłowski explains how his communication with artists from the other side of the Iron Curtain, e.g. Latin America or Great Britain, depended on having an understanding of the same philosophical language, regardless of not sharing the political beliefs that often came with it.

Chapter 3: “Against Eastern Europe”

The artist speaks about his past reservations towards the differentiation between Western and Eastern Europe, and how his opinion changed after the political transformation of 1989. Kozłowski also explains his understanding of artistic creation versus art production; the perspective he shared with many artists from the West who exhibited at the gallery Akumulatory 2.

Chapter 4: “Listening in Teaching”

A long-time professor, Kozłowski shares his pedagogical approaches to the difficulties of teaching in a postcolonial context, on the example of his experience in Zambia.

Chapter 5: “Escape from Political Framework”

Rejecting the pressure to interpret every artistic act a political statement, in fear that it can be used as propaganda, Kozłowski advocates for some political autonomy of artistic creation. To prove his point, the artist tells the story of the fluctuating political meanings of his work “Green Wall Out of Any Political Context.”

Chapter 6: “Escaping Pleasure”

Responding to the question about his decision to stop painting as a mean of avoiding pleasure, Kozłowski explains his long-term attempt to escape straight definitions for his art.

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In presenting a pre-1990s regionally defined globalism, Global Conceptualism did not attempt to blur the geographical boundaries despite the fact that a nascent transnationalism was evident in networked art, even in the 1950s. In the last fifteen years, much has changed in the ways that globality is thought about in museums, not least because of rapid changes in communication. As contemporary art traces similar paths to those of transnational financial flows, the emphasis on the global is rendered suspicious because of its deep entanglement with capital. Although neoliberal forces are certainly at play, the impetus for researching art from outside the traditional purview of US institutions must be understood as much more complex, in that it is also an attempt to understand the history of art scenes and movements that are growing ever more connected. Not only an impetus then, but also an imperative.

The term conceptualism has also been contested in recent years. If using the label makes available widely disparate works that respond to very different contexts, it is also guilty of flattening out the unique nature of propositions made by artists around the world. What can be learned today from an exhibition such as Global Conceptualism? How can the incommensurability of artworks created in different places be considered productively? Is the “global” exhibition defunct or do new curatorial practices that cast aside curatorial values such as coherence or chronological linearity (as Weiss suggests in her text) need to be developed? What alternatives might be sought to this model of exhibition?

This Theme, Global Conceptualism Reconsidered, offers an opportunity to think about these questions. It also offers the chance to reposition some of the materials published by post over the last few years. In addition to the two texts by Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss and an interview with Luis Camnitzer, the project directors, we asked the curators of different sections to reflect on their involvement in the exhibition, and republished here some of the reviews and installation shots of the exhibition.

“We Painted the Crystal, We Thought About the Crystal”—The Crystalist Manifesto (Khartoum, 1976) in Context

Anneka Lenssen

Thinking Back on Global Conceptualism

Rachel Weiss

Global Conceptualism: Reflections

Jane Farver

Conceptualism, Dematerialization, Arte no-objetual? Historicizing the ’60s and ’70s in Latin America

Harper Montgomery

Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents – Art and Arab Life, a Questionnaire

Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Lookofsky, Sarah Rogers and Nada Shabout

Margarita Tupitsyn Looks Back: Thoughts on Global Conceptualism

Margarita Tupitsyn

A Conversation with Adriana Valdés (Part 1)

Adriana Valdés

A Conversation with Adriana Valdés (Part 2)

Adriana Valdés

László Beke Looks Back: Thoughts on Global Conceptualism

László Beke

“Pop Art Is Poison.” Cildo Meireles on Ideological Circuits

Cildo Meireles

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15 years later a leading Slovenian theorist of art from the former Eastern Europe, Igor Zabel, could already state in the past tense: “There was once a time when people knew exactly where the center of the art world was located and where the provinces where”. His words clearly reveal the pre-1989 geopolitical hierarchies that laid the foundation for the exoticizing representation of the region. Back in 2001, Zabel’s statement was still rather a desire for the final dissolution of these hierarchies than an actual assessment of the status quo. But his words can be repeated with full force today.

In 2014, when a group of curators and researchers from The Museum of Modern Art travels to Central and Eastern Europe, it is not to experience a mythically enchanted and bewildering art scene, but to revisit old colleagues, with whom the relationship dates back decades, to meet with the artists represented in MoMA’s collection, and to try to keep up with the rapid development of the local art scenes as well as the growing number of institutions and bottom-up initiatives.

Our 10-day research trip to Central Europe took us to multiple cities whose names start with “B”: Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, Brno and Wrocław (don’t be fooled by the last one – pre-1945 it used to be called Breslau). The visit was a brisk run through public museums and artists’ personal studios, through cozy apartments and vast storage spaces, contemporary art galleries and used books stores. We decided to focus our attention on the art of 1960s and 1970s, but were too often positively distracted by the appeal of early 20th century avant-garde architecture and design that is so prolific in these cities.

Traveling like this was not possible even 10 years ago: With all the world’s knowledge accessible online at our disposal, we were able to check New York libraries holdings when exposed to a rare book on sale or access MoMA archives when in need of answers to questions about the Museum’s past travelling shows. Needles to say, it was the smartphones that possessed the most magical powers available. However, these powers could be only used well with the local help. Our generous hosts took us to back streets and alleys not visible on google maps. Here, we share our experience of these places as well as impressions and observations from encounters with art and people of Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, as well as individuals we met on the occasion of the opening of the biennial in Berlin.

Magdalena Moskalewicz

1. BUDAPEST

At the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art

Visiting Katalin Ladik

By Jon Hendricks

It’s hard to describe the shock and pleasure of first experiencing the work of a great artist one has never heard of. Katalin Ladik is one of those special artists who is all too hidden from public perception. On our C-MAP trip to Budapest, we had the chance to first see a group of her works at the Ludwig Museum: scores constructed of sewing patterns, seemingly random found bits of score, and other interventions. Then we visited her, and she showed us more works, works that we could look at closely, and we asked if we could hear what the scores sounded like. And then, she vocalized the scores, transfixing us. But this is not her only work. We saw more, and there is more to see: photographs of her powerful performances, poetry that mesmerized her contemporary, young generation of Hungarian artists, and a captivating soul. We were all so taken with Katalin Ladik.

Katalin Ladik’s spontaneous performance

Kassák Museum

By Juliet Kinchin

On the second day of our visit, we traveled under clear blue skies to the opposite end of the city from the Ludwig Museum, to the sleepy district of Obuda, an area of lowrise 17th- and18th-century buildings that is also the site of the Roman remains of the ancient city of Aquincum. Busy main roads and high-rise housing from the 1970s now encircle those historic structures. The Kassák Museum opened in Obuda in 1976 as a branch of the Petofi Literary Museum, an affiliation that positioned Lajos Kassák (1887–1967) first and foremost as a poet and critic rather than an artist-designer In recent years this emphasis has been inverted, with greater prominence given to his work as a visual artist in the newly refurbished displays. The current installation and programming feels fresh and accessible, serving to contextualize the long career of this seminal avant-garde figure both synchronically and diachronically and exploring his diverse international connections across Europe. The museum’s present and planned activities speak to a renewed interest in early modernist avant-gardes among the younger generation of curators, historians, artists and designers. The bold design of the new permanent displays effectively complements but does not overwhelm the art and documentary source material—a particular challenge, since the collection of works in various media is graphically so strong. The red and black display furniture and exclamatory texts screened directly on the walls blend with the more intimate scale of the printed ephemera on display.

János Szoboszlai and Katalin Szőke talked to us about the current thematic exhibition, Kassak and Kassak 2. The show addresses Kassák’s reworking in the 1960s of his 1920s output, a project undertaken after a successful exhibition in Paris. Questions of authenticity and originality have been a long-standing problem in considerations of Kassák’s early and later works. In tackling this question head-on and unraveling the complex history of Kassák’s 1960s reprints, the museum is offering fascinating perspectives on the trajectory of the artist’s practice and reputation on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

This is one in a series of research and exhibition projects on the historical avant-garde in Hungary undertaken by the staff at the Kassák Museum. Another currently in progress and outlined by curator Katalin Szőke during our visit is an international, interdisciplinary examination of Budapest’s dance and movement avant-garde of the 1920s, paying particular attention to the experimental pioneers Valeria Dienes and Alice Madzsar. Embracing numerous key figures in Central European art, music, drama and dance, this project whose development we will be watching closely over the next year or two.

Artpool

By Milan Hughston

The group’s focused visits in Budapest included a site visit to Artpool, one of the most active and comprehensive collections of experimental art practice in Europe. We were hosted by its founders, Júlia Klaniczay and György Galántai, at Artpool’s large archive located in the heart of Budapest.

Artpool was established in 1970 to produce, network, curate, and document avant-garde art practices in all formats. The resulting collection is astounding in scale and scope, covering contemporary art practice from the 1970s to the present.

In 2013, Artpool published a 535-page history of their efforts in a beautifully produced catalogue that is available in its entirety through the MoMA Library online catalogue.

In spite of their success, Artpool and its founders face serious financial and space issues in the contemporary climate of Hungary. It is vital that this unique centre of visual art action and documentation continue to tell its story.

Miklós Erdély Estate

Views of Budapest

At Budapest Art Galleries

Meeting with Tamas St.Auby

By Jon Hendricks

Tamas St. Auby is a legendary figure in the avant garde. He is one of them. He continues to be one of them. You kick over a stone, and there he is. You open a door and peek in— there he is. Hungary hid from him for twenty years. The art world has hidden from him even longer. What are we afraid of? His mind is a provocation; his mind is a revelation. He has so much to say, and our group was treated with an amazing and lucid presentation of his work.

Walk through modernist villas in the Napraforgó street, with Pal Ritook and Ardnas Ferkai

Villas in Napraforgó utca

By Juliet Kinchin

Given Budapest’s spectacular and rich architectural fabric, it has been disappointing to learn of the closure of the Museum of Architecture formerly situated near the Kassák Museum in Obuda. The entire staff has been dismissed (except for the current director Pal Ritook) and the collections have been removed to inaccessible, off-site storage pending possible inclusion in an expanded fine arts museum campus in the Varosliget. An equal if not greater loss is the closure of the museum’s display space in the Castle District and the program of excellent traveling exhibitions that the museum organized regularly for venues throughout Hungary and abroad.

Despite these problems, Ritook and Prof. Andras Ferkai of the Moholy-Nagy Művészeti Egyetem (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design) prepared a collection of archival materials that they circulated during our architectural walking tour of modernist villas in Napraforgó utca (literally Sunflower Street) in residential Buda. Having started the day with a focus on Kassák and modernist graphics, a few of us ended the day with another journey back to the utopian future in this delightful enclave of early 1930s modernism, a legacy of Hungary’s influential participation in the Bauhaus. We began in Pasaréti tér, a square framed by a modernist bus station on one side and a Roman Catholic church and monastery on the other, all designed by the architect Gyula Rimanóczy in 1933. Alongside this is Napraforgó utca, an ensemble of twenty-two modest family houses built in 1930-31. This project was the culmination of several years of campaigning to encourage the authorities and the public at large to adopt modern principles in house design. It started in 1925, when Farkas Molnár, a star graduate of the Weimar Bauhaus and an assistant in Walter Gropius’s architectural office, returned to Budapest to spread the modernist gospel. Pointing to the success of the 1928 modernist housing exhibition at the Weissenhof estate in Stuttgart, Molnar and a group of up-and-coming architects petitioned the Budapest Public Works Council in 1930 to build a whole street of small houses. The group also included Jozsef Fischer and Lajos Kozma, the finest modern architects in Hungary. The names of all involved appear on a stone block at the center of a small square on one side of the street, where locals still gather to chat and play. This project, like the one in Stuttgart and others in Wrocław (then the German Breslau) and Prague, was to demonstrate that the main task of modern architecture was the construction of practical, affordable housing and rationally designed buildings. The neo-conservative social and political climate in Hungary between the Wars meant that, compared to Germany and the Netherlands, the country had very little public or collective architecture. Rather, new modernist ideas were applied mostly to the design of single-family homes and villas. Within a year of the initial proposal, the twenty-two houses had been built. With all of the architects working on plots of the same size, this little development shows what a small group of enthusiasts with a utopian vision could achieve in a year.

2. BRATISLAVA

Bratislava City Gallery

By Juliet Kinchin

It did not take long to travel from Budapest to another country and to Bratislava, the second of five cities on our itinerary beginning with B, if one counts Breslau, now Wroclaw. Traveling between these major cultural centers in a minibus was a reminder of how diverse and concentrated Central European culture is, with different peoples, languages, styles, and values often co-existing in cities just fifty or sixty miles apart. In Bratislava, we were met by Juraj Carny and taken directly to the City Gallery in the heart of the Old Town. In advance of the string of meetings scheduled with artists that afternoon, the gallery’s survey of Slovak conceptualism of the 1960s and ’70s (Koller, Bartoš, Filko, Sikora, Mlynárčik, Ďurček, etc.) gave us an excellent overview and preparation. Chief curator Zsófia Kiss-Szemán explained that there had been a great push in recent years to build up this part of the collection, which in its totality ranges from the Gothic to the art of the present. Some types of work fared better than others in the relatively intimate and historical atmosphere of spaces carved out of a former palace. One of the most successful was the vertiginous passageway created by Matej Krén between seemingly endless walls of books. Proceeding gingerly along the narrow path that Krén describes as a kind of symbolic “short cut across the world”, we felt the weight of the inaccessible knowledge locked within the tomes on either side. The books were those censored or discarded in Communist times.

Galéria Cypriána Majernika

By Juliet Kinchin

Despite a prevailing climate of censorship in the 1960s and the controversial closure of several of its exhibitions, the Galéria Cypriána Majernika clearly provided an important forum for young Czechoslovakian artists under the age of thirty-five. A state-run organization similar to Young Artists’ Centers in several other Soviet Bloc countries, the gallery had the prerogative to retain work by the artists it showed. The collection that has accumulated in this way is a fascinating time capsule of semi-official art from the 1960s to the 1980s, with limited additions of more recent work. I was particularly intrigued by a picture entitled Tesco Woman. Originally painted by Julián Filo, a politically engaged artist of the 1980s, it has been given a contemporary makeover by Veronika Rónaiová – the artist’s daughter. Due to the current restructuring of visual arts venues in Bratislava, this gallery’s function has been largely superseded. With the transfer of former director Richard Gregor to the City Gallery and a tightened budget, it remains to be seen whether the Galéria Cypriána Majernika can reinvent itself to perform a new role in the visual culture of post-Communist Slovakia.

Seminar with Slovak Artists and Curators at Kunsthalle Bratislava

Milan Adamčiak

By Jon Hendricks

Our trip to Bratislava was my first trip to Slovakia and my introduction to a number of marvelous artists and very generous and gracious curators and directors of cultural institutions. I was very taken by the work of Adamčiak, whose intriguing art takes several vigorous forms. He described an early piece where he went under a bridge and played his violin under water. It must have been so beautiful. He entranced us with descriptions of other sound explorations and innovations. We were shown scores that he has composed; it was so marvelous to be introduced again and again to artists who have been working with scores and sound art in the various cities that we visited.

Stano Masar

By Michelle Elligott

During a full afternoon conference organized by the Kunsthalle Bratislava, which was commenced by an excellent overview of Slovak art from the 1960s-on by Chief Curator Richard Gregor, we enjoyed presentations by a handful of artists.  Stano Masar presented an overview of his practice.  Notable are his two series of Global History of Art, 2004 and Contemporary Art, 2007.  In these series, Masar selects icons of art, from old masters to recent wonders, and translates them, if you will, into the language of infographics to create uniform pictographs.  The artist succeeds in distilling the image to its immediately recognizable, core form – its dna; utilizing the pervasive international language of graphic signage; and instilling a hint of humor to create a wonderful body of work.

Studio visit with Otis Laubert

By Milan Hughston

While visiting Bratislava, Jon Hendricks and I were taken by Juraj Carny to the studio of Otis Laubert, a Slovakian artist born in 1946. Upon arrival, it was apparent why a studio visit to Laubert’s home and workshop was necessary to understand the full breadth and scope of his work. The studio and home are located in a dense warren of buildings located in a suburb of Bratislava. It is a wonderland of found objects beautifully incorporated into all mediums—collage, paintings, and furniture, to name just a few genres.

Artist and theorist Jiří Valoch characterizes Laubert’s practice succinctly: “We could say Otis’s major summarizing work is his deposit—the collection of various objects, originating in about 1965 and containing thousands of things ordered according to certain rules.” Our visit with Laubert confirmed that.

Monogramista T.D.

By Jon Hendricks

Later that same afternoon that we met Milan Adamčiak, we visited the studio of Monogramista, an artist who also works with scores and installations. Unfortunately, we did not have the opportunity to hear his works, but visually they were very striking and beautiful. I look forward to seeing more work by Monogramista and Adamčiak and hope we will have the opportunity to meet both again soon.

Studio visit with Monogramista

Tranzit.sk

3. BRNO

Moravian Gallery – Jiří Valoch Archive

By Michelle Elligott

Moravian Gallery graphics

By Juliet Kinchin

In 1961, the same year that the Bratislava City Gallery was established, Brno’s Museum of Applied Arts morphed into its current form as the Moravian Gallery of Art. With rich historical collections, several branch museums and ambitious plans to accommodate the living archive of Jiří Valoch and other contemporary artists from the region, it remains the most significant cultural institution in Brno. Curator Marta Sylvestrova took time out from the final stages of preparation for Brno’s renowned International Biennial of Graphic Design to lead a few of us behind the scenes. I was particularly keen to explore the posters and graphic design collection and to catch up with her research for a forthcoming exhibition on Zdeněk Rossmann (1905–84), a former Bauhaus pupil and pioneer of the New Typography in interwar Czechoslovakia, whose work is represented at MoMA. I had just come across mention of Rossmann in Bratislava, where he and the photographer Jaromír Funke taught in the avant-garde School of Applied Arts, known as the Bauhaus of the East. This link was typical of the personal and cultural connections we encountered among many of the cities on our itinerary.

Moravian Gallery collections

Jiří Valoch

By Jon Hendricks

Dear Jiří Valoch—he so kindly came to greet us at the Moravian Gallery, where he has installed his archives. Jiří is an artist whose work has been in contact with many in the Fluxus group, and there is a good exchange of material in the Valoch archives and in the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives now at MoMA. I am certain that many scholars will be making good use of the material so that we can come to a fuller understanding of Valoch’s work.

Villa Tugendhat

By Paul Galloway

On May 24 the C-MAP Fluxus group visited the city of Brno in the Czech Republic. In addition to visiting local artists and curators, the team made a pilgrimage to one of the most important modernist houses of the 20th century: Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat. Recently reopened after a long and thorough restoration, the Villa Tugendhat is a stunning example of Mies’s explorations in spatial and material design. After the harried first few days of the trip to Eastern Europe, the C-MAP group greatly enjoyed a lengthy tour of the Villa with the site’s director, Iveta Černá, followed by a leisurely exploration of the grounds.

As steward of the Mies van der Rohe Archive, the Museum of Modern Art has an important relationship with all things Mies in the world. MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design played an important supporting role in the long and complex restoration to the Villa Tugendhat, which was undertaken by the city of Brno under the auspices of UNESCO’s World Heritage program. Teams of researchers from Brno spent hundreds of hours at MoMA’s Lily Auchincloss Study Center for Architecture and Design poring over the Museum’s holdings. By the end of the project, a partnership was formed between the Villa’s Study and Documentation Centre and MoMA’s Mies Archive. After the much celebrated reopening of the Villa to the public, curator Juliet Kinchin and I were, in particular, thrilled to visit and cement the lasting friendship with our brilliant colleagues in Brno.

Studio visit with J.H. Kocman

By Milan Hughston

The group visited the home and studio of J.H. Kocman, a prolific book artist and craftsman born in Brno in 1947. Especially after the Prague Spring of 1968, Kocman, like many artists of his generation, had to resort to alternative art practices in order to produce and distribute his works. Primarily, he turned to mail art and rubber stamps to disseminate his work, and in spite of the repressive political climate, he was very productive. The Artists’ Books collection of the MoMA Library contains eleven of his books dating from 1970 to 1995, illustrating a wide range of techniques from stamps to marbling.

Kocman’s studio is filled with evidence of his love and use of paper, particularly marbling. The group admired many of his later books—proof that he has continued to work steadily in the medium for many years.

4. PRAGUE

Jan Ságl and Zorka Ságlová

By Michelle Elligott

Jiří Kovanda and Pavlina Morganova

By Jon Hendricks

In Prague, Pavlina Morganova very kindly arranged for Jiří Kovanda to show us his stunning exhibition at the City Gallery of Photography, where we had fun trying to identify artists’ work that he referenced in his own work.

We then walked to the center of Prague with Jiří Kovanda and Pavlina Morganova, and with Pavlina showing us photographs of Jiri’s gesture actions from the mid-1970s, Jiří showed us the exact spots where he had performed them, and we were able to envisage the power of the actions in the context of the surrounding cityscape during a period of restricted freedom in the country. We then all walked to the escalator, and in a way reenacted his 1977 Untitled action. He is a fascinating artist who I knew too little about and I think is someone who has continued to do very strong work up until today.

Pavlina Morganova

By Jon Hendricks

Pavlina is a brilliant scholar who has dug deeply into the history of Czech action art, and her new book Czech Action Art: Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art behind the Iron Curtain (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2014) is an invaluable reference for all of us who are so interested in Czech art. She was extremely generous with her time, and I know we’re all grateful to her for her kindness.

Meeting Jiří Kovanda

By Roxana Marcoci

One of the highlights of our C-MAP trip was the time we shared with artist Jiří Kovanda, a leading figure of Czech Actionism, in Prague. Our meeting point was the Prague House of Photography, where we viewed the exhibition Jiří Kovanda Against the Rest of the World, featuring his legendary actions of the 1970s within the context of the history of performance art. Then, we took a walking tour with him and Czech curator Pavlina Morganova around the city to revisit the sites of his public actions.

Kovanda began his career in the radicalized climate of the 1970s (following the 1968 Soviet reoccupation of Czechoslovakia), during a period of forced “normalization” of his country by the Soviet military. Working against the backdrop of political repression, Kovanda asserted his difference amid hardline social conformity by performing minimal yet disruptive gestures. Looking at art as a vehicle for change, Kovanda simply carried water from the river in his cupped hands, releasing it a few meters down the river; he gathered rubbish, and once he had made a pile of it he scattered it all over again; he invited friends to watch him try making friends with a girl; and he walked around Prague, casually touching, in a gentle brushing gesture, passersby—an action that was kindred to Vito Acconci’s “following” pieces of the same period. While walking with Kovanda around Prague, we arrived at one of the city’s subway entrances. Here, the artist allowed us to reenact with him one of his most influential works: Untitled (On an escalator . . . turning around, I look into the eyes of the person standing behind me . . . ), from September 3, 1977). This was a private moment with a generous artist, which left an indelible memory. Analyzing ideas about conformity and malleability, in works such as On an escalator, Kovanda encouraged critical reflection on the relationship between the individual and the ideological forces that shape social reality.

Walk Through Prague with Jiří Kovanda and Pavlina Morganova

Museum Kampa

Kveta Pacovska

By Milan Hughston

When visiting the Moravian Gallery in Brno, we were encouraged by Marta Sylvestrova to meet with the Prague-based artist and illustrator Kveta Pacovska, who is married to Milan Grygar. Pacovska has enjoyed a long career as one of former Czechoslavakia’s most recognized and published artists of children’s books. In fact, one of our hosts, Tomas Pospiszyl, said that all children of a certain age in Slovakia immediately recognize the whimsical yet instructional images that Pacovska has been producing for forty years.

When in Prague the next day after visiting Brno, I took a taxi to her studio in a residential suburb of Prague and found her to be an enchanting, modest, and hard-working artist, still going strong at the age of 86. Each of her many books takes an often unique approach in teaching children how to count, spell, and recognize shapes. She is too modest to note that her books continue to sell well internationally and that she was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1992, the premier honor for writers and illustrators of children’s books.

The rest of the CMAP group had the privilege of meeting her when we visited Milan Grygar’s studio later that day.

Milan Grygar’s Acoustic Drawings

Walk through Prague Art Galleries

Views of Prague

5. WROCŁAW

Muzeum Współczesne-Ludwiński Archive

By Michelle Elligott

Muzeum Współczesne

Meeting Natalia LL

Olympic Stadium

By Milan Hughston

It is often a good idea to listen to your taxi driver when visiting a city you are not familiar with, especially if you are interested in modern architecture. As we were departing Wroclaw for Berlin, our driver, knowing of our interest in the Centennial Hall, suggested that we visit the Olympic Stadium in Wroclaw. The stadium was built in 1926–1928 by German architect Richard Konwiarz (1883–1960) as Schleisierkampfbahn (Silesian Arena) when Wroclaw, then called Breslau, was part of Germany. Like many other visitors, we were confounded by its name, since no official Olympics took place in Breslau. However, it is acknowledged that it could have been planned as a venue for the Summer 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin.

Konwiarz’s design was awarded a bronze medal in the art competitions held during the Summer 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Although it has seen constant use as a motor speedway and soccer stadium, it still retains its essential character and modernist feel.

Architecture in Wrocław/Breslau

By Juliet Kinchin

Less well known than the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart is the Deutsche Werkbund’s comparable initiative known as Wohnungs- und Werkraumausstellung (Workplace and House Exhibition, WUWA), carried out in 1929, when Wrocław (then Breslau) was still part of Germany. The posters and graphic identity created by Johannes Mohlzahn for this event are among of the highlights of MoMA’s New Typography collection. The exhibition took the form of a housing development made up of functional “type” houses by a group of modernist architects. One of the most interesting buildings in the complex was Hans Scharoun’s house for singles and young couples, which now serves as a hotel. Noting our interest in modernist architecture, our driver took us on a short detour to the somewhat derelict “Olympic” Stadium built in 1926–28, then extended from 1935–39 as the Hermann Goring Stadion. Before leaving Wroclaw, we also paid homage to a pioneering work of modern engineering and architecture, Max Berg’s Centennial Hall of 1911–13 (now known as the Hala Ludowa, or People’s Hall). The importance of the hall has been recognized and it is now a UNESCO site. This massive recreational and performance space was constructed of reinforced concrete, providing a powerful example of the potential of this material to enclose and span huge spaces without the need for supporting columns. It survived the devastation of World War Two, becoming the setting in 1945 for the International Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, which was attended by György Lukacs, Pablo Picasso, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard and Julian Huxley, among others. Perhaps MoMA’s founding director Alfred Barr was there also, since he acquired a printed textile square designed by Picasso to commemorate this event. Barr later donated the piece to the Museum.

Centennial Hall

6. BERLIN

Fahrbereitschaft, Haubrok Collection

By Michelle Elligott

Dorothy Iannone

By Jon Hendricks

I had the opportunity to see Dorothy Iannone’s major retrospective at the Berlinische Gallery days before it closed, and also to visit her in her studio. She is a dynamic and bold artist whose work I’ve admired for many years, and her retrospective gave a chance for many to become more familiar with her work over a long career. She is a political artist in the best sense of the word who spares no one. She is bitingly honest and direct. Her retrospective will be traveling to Zurich later this summer (Migrosmuseum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, August 30–November 19, 2014), so many more will have a chance to see it there. It was strange to be in her home with the usual cacophony of work momentarily stilled by the retrospective, but she was there and made up for any lack of the work’s presence, as she was present, and her voice and ideas are like her work.

Bazon Brock

By Jon Hendricks

Bazon Brock is an artist who I am familiar with only by name, by association, and by traces of his work. He was part of 24 Stunden at the Galerie Parnass (Wuppertal, 1965) and was also part of the legendary Aachen, July 20, 1964 events titled Actions, Agit-Pop, De-Coll/age, Happenings, Events, L’Autrisme, Art Total, Re-Fluxus, which included works by Eric Andersen, Joseph Beuys, Stanley Brouwn, Henning Christiansen, Robert Filliou, Ludwig Gosewitz, Arthur Koepcke, Tomas Schmit, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams, which is most famous in our consciousness for a photograph of Joseph Beuys with a bloody nose, holding his arm up, and with the other hand holding an assemblage with a crucifix. Brock was fascinating to talk with and had very different points of view about Fluxus and the period than I have, and I hope that we will have an opportunity to have him visit the Museum in New York to discuss his thoughts further.

Seen at Berlin Biennale

The post All the Cities that Start with “B.” Notes from a Trip to Central Europe appeared first on post.

In addition to autonomous pieces of music, the Experimental Studio at the Polish Radio in Warsaw produced incidental music for radio broadcasts and soundtracks for movies and TV. In fact, this utilitarian task was the Studio’s first and main mission. See some of the films whose soundtracks were produced at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio below and read the essay “Colors of Joy and Sadness: Polish Electronic Music in Service to Cinematography” to learn more.

Zupa (Soup)

Zbigniew Rybczyński, 1974.

Screenplay, Direction and Photography: Zbigniew Rybczyński, Music: Eugeniusz Rudnik. 8 mins. Production: SE-MA-FOR Film Studio in Łódź, 1974© Filmoteka Narodowa (National Film Archive). Courtesy of Filmoteka Narodowa

Podróż (Trip)

Daniel Szczechura, 1983.

Screenplay and Direction: Daniel Szczechura. Photography: Waclaw Fedak. Music: Eugeniusz Rudnik. 7 min. Production: ZODIAK FILM STUDIO in Warsaw, 1983© Filmoteka Narodowa (National Film Archive). Courtesy of Filmoteka Narodowa

Prostokąt Dynamiczny (Dynamic Rectangle)

Józef Robakowski. 1971

35 mm short film. Music: Eugeniusz Rudnik. 2:30 min. Production: Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Filmowa, Telewizyjna i Teatralna w Łodzi, Warsztat Formy Filmowej, Łódź 1971. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź.© Józef Robakowski. Courtesy of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź

Akademia Pana Kleksa (Mr. Blot’s Academy)

Krzysztof Gradowski

Screenplay and Direction: Krzysztof Gradowski Photography: Zygmunt Samosiuk Music: Andrzej Korzynski

Excerpt. Production: ZODIAK FILM STUDIO in Warsaw, 1983© Filmoteka Narodowa (National Film Archive). Courtesy of Filmoteka Narodowa

Polska Kronika Filmowa: Studio Eksperymentalne (Polish Newsreel: Experimental Studio)

Wladyslaw Forbert

Excerpt of Polish Newsreel 2A/63 Photography: Wladyslaw Forbert, Documentary and Feature Film Studio, 1963© Documentary and Feature Film Studio

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The first concert of Polish electroacoustic music, also often called “music for tape”, took place in 1960. It was as if the magnetic tape itself was the instrument. On arrival, the audience encountered an almost-empty stage, and in place of live musicians with their string, brass or percussion instruments – they found only loudspeakers. The concert included the premiere of Włodzimierz Kotoński’s Study for One Cymbal Stroke (1959), whose 2 min 41 seconds were based solely on a single, pre-recorded sound. “The sound material of this study has been produced” – as the composer later explained – “from single sound obtained by striking a medium-sized Turkish cymbal with a soft stick”. Kotoński then filtered this material into 5 different bandwidths and transposed it into 11 pitches, as well as methodically regulated the length, for the complete Study to emerge.

The concert was held at the Warsaw Autumn Festival of Contemporary Music, whose program favored experiments. Born out of the relative loosening of strict cultural policies in the Soviet Block around the year 1956, the festival attracted and welcomed renowned international composers. It was there that in 1958 Karlheinz Stockhausen presented compositions of his elektronische Musik to the Warsaw audience five years after it premiered in Cologne, and where Pierre Schaffer gave a concert of his musique concrète in 1959. Polish electroacoustic music was the effect of the marriage of these two techniques, which merged the purely synthetically-generated sounds of Stockhausen’s electronic music with the pre-recorded, “concrete” sounds from the real world, employed by Schaffer.

Composers who visited Warsaw on the occasion of the Festival often used the facilities of the Experimental Studio at the Polish Radio. It was there that over 300 autonomous pieces of electroacoustic music were produced since its inception in 1957, in addition to numerous film soundtracks and music for radio broadcasts. The composers worked closely with Bohdan Mazurek and Eugeniusz Rudnik, the sound technicians employed at the Studio, whose extraordinary music production skills – cutting and pasting of music tape as well as transformation of the pre-recorded sounds – led them with time to create their own compositions.

Here you can listen to 23 music compositions (some in multiple versions) created at Polish Radio Experimental Studio by both the foreign and local composers. Starting with Kotoński’s Study, the first autonomous piece of music for tape produced at PRES in 1959, the presented selection leads through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The first decade at the Studio was marked by experiments similar to Kotoński’s: Most prominently, with multiple compositions by Andrzej Dobrowolski that employed magnetic tape together with traditional instruments: the piano, violin or oboe (Music for Magnetic Tape and Oboe Solo, 1965; Music for Magnetic Tape and Piano Solo, 1972). As well as the only electroacoustic piece ever composed by Krzysztof Penderecki, for which the composer used recordings of sung and pronounced basic elements of speech – single vowels and so-called “whistling” consonants, typical for the Polish language (Psalmus, 1961). In 1966 Bogusław Schaeffer, a composer as well as artist and playwright, created multiple versions of his Assemblage. Keeping up with the Zeitgeist both in the work’s title and the openness of its structure, Schaeffer recorded 3 versions, each with the same number of elements, recorded at a different speed.

The Studio’s production over the next decades was marked by the introduction of new equipment, especially the 1970 acquisition of the Moog synthesizer (available commercially since 1964). It was often used by the KEW group – Krzysztof Knittel, Elżbieta Sikora and Wojciech Michniewski – three young composers, who debuted in Warsaw in 1973. In Orpheus Head (1981) Sikora – who had studied with Pierre Schaeffer and Francois Bayle at Groupe de Recherche Musicales – used just one concrete, pre-recorded sound in addition to the synthesizer. It was the sound of a female voice, used to evoke the scream of Eurydice’s reverberating in the depths of inferno.

In order to popularize compositions written for magnetic tape, PRES published seven sets that included the music’s original score and the record. Most interestingly, at the time when tape recorders were not widely used, the music composed for – and produced with – magnetic tape had to be circulated on vinyl.

Audio recordings presented here come from the archives of Polish Radio in Warsaw, where they were transferred from tape into digital files. Courtesy of the Polish Radio.

Etude for one Cymbal Stroke Włodzimierz Kotoń ski

Duration: 2’40”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1959, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Psalmus 1961 – Magetic Tape Krzysztof Penderecki

Duration: 5’05”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1961, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Mikrostructures – for Magnetic Tape Włodzimierz Kotoński

Duration: 5’20”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production, Bohdan Mazurek – sound production, Krzysztof Szlifirski– sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1963, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Music for Magnetic Tape and Oboe Solo Andrzej Dobrowolski

Duration: 9’00”. Janusz Banaszek – oboe, Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1965, Warsaw, Studio S-2. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Collage – for Magnetic Tape Eugeniusz Rudnik

Duration: 5’01”. Eugeniusz Rudnik– sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1965, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Assemblage I – for Magnetic Tape (Master Version) Bogusław Schaeffer

Duration: 8’31”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1966, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Assemblage II – for Magnetic Tape (Master Version) Bogusław Schaeffer

Duration: 4’07”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1966, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Assemblage III – for Magnetic Tape (Master Version) Bogusław Schaeffer

Duration: 18’01”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1966, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Hommage a Strzemiński – film score (Concert Version) Bogusław Schaeffer

Duration: 5’48”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1967, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Bozzetti – for Magnetic Tape (Version I) Bohdan Mazurek

Duration: 4’59”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1967, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Bozzetti – for Magnetic Tape (Version II) Bohdan Mazurek

Duration: 5’02”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1967, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Phonomorphia I – Etude for Magnetic Tape Dubravko Detoni

Duration: 4’10”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 14 Jan 1967, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Dixi – for Magnetic Tape Eugeniusz Rudnik

Duration: 4’45”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1967, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Epitafium – for Magnetic Tape (Version I) Bohdan Mazurek

Duration: 6’35”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1969, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Epitafium – for Magnetic Tape (Version II) Bohdan Mazurek

Duration: 6’38”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1969, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Epitafium – for Magnetic Tape (Version III) Bohdan Mazurek

Duration: 6’39”. Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1969, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Aela. Electronic Music Włodzimierz Kotoński

Duration: 10’32”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound recording maker. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1967, Warsaw, Studio PR.Courtesy of Polish Radio

Symphony (1966) – for magnetic tape/version from 1970 Bogusław Schaeffer

Duration: 17’24”. Bohdan Mazurek– sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1970, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Heraklitiana – harp solo and magnetic tape Bogusław Schaeffer

Duration: 20’45”. Mazurek Urszula – harp, Bohdan Mazurek – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1970, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Lux et tenebrae (Osaka impression) – for Magnetic Tape Arne Nordheim

Duration: 19’30”. Rudnik Eugeniusz – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1970, Experimental Studio. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Music for Magnetic Tape and Piano Solo Andrzej Dobrowolski

Duration: 11’55”. Dutkiewicz Andrzej – piano, Mazurek Bohdan – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1972, Experimental Studio. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Ekecheirija – for Magnetic Tape (music composed for the opening ceremony of the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972) Krzysztof Penderecki

Duration: 3’11”. Józef Bok – conductor of the National Philharmonic Choir in Warsaw, Jerzy Dukaj – declamation, Zygmunt Listkiewicz – declamation, Bernard Ładysz – bass, Włodzimierz Press – declamation, Mieczysław Voit – declamation, Tomasz Zaliwski – declamation, Andrzej Żarnecki, Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1972, Warsaw, PWSM. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Ekecheirija II – for Magnetic Tape (music composed for the opening ceremony of the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972) Krzysztof Penderecki

Duration: 2’39”. Józef Bok – conductor of the National Philharmonic Choir in Warsaw, Jerzy Dukaj – declamation, Zygmunt Listkiewicz – declamation, Bernard Ładysz – bass, Włodzimierz Press – declamation, Mieczysław Voit – declamation, Tomasz Zaliwski – declamation, Andrzej Żarnecki, Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1972, Warsaw, PWSM. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Ekecheirija III – for Magnetic Tape (music composed for the opening ceremony of the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972) Krzysztof Penderecki

Duration: 3’06”. Józef Bok – conductor of the National Philharmonic Choir in Warsaw, Jerzy Dukaj – declamation, Zygmunt Listkiewicz – declamation, Bernard Ładysz – bass, Włodzimierz Press – declamation, Mieczysław Voit – declamation, Tomasz Zaliwski – declamation, Andrzej Żarnecki, Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1972, Warsaw, PWSM. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Concerto for piano and magnetic tape Szabolcs Esztenyi

Duration: 28’10”. Esztenyi Szabolcs – piano, Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded on 7 July 1973, Warsaw, Studio M-1. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Robak zdobywca – for magnetic tape Krzysztof Knittel

Duration: 12’00”. Krzysztof Knittel– sound production, Barbara Okoń – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1976, Warsaw, Studio PR.Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Orpheus’s Head – for magnetic tape Elżbieta Sikora

Duration: 17’08”. Barbara Okoń-Makowska – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1981, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Homo ludens – radio ballet, not without autobiographical elements Eugeniusz Rudnik

Duration: 32’29”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production, Barbara Okoń-Makowska– sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1984, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Diario ‘87 – electronic sounds with spoken text Music: Tomasz Sikorski/ Text: Jorge Luis Borges

Duration: 7’31”. Jerzy Kamas – declamation (voice-over), Barbara Okoń-Makowska– sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1987, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

Ptacy i ludzie – etiuda koncertowa na 4 artystów, 3 skrzypiec, 2 słowiki, nożyczki i garncarkę ludową (concert étude) Eugeniusz Rudnik

Duration: 15’49”. Eugeniusz Rudnik – sound production. Producer: Polish Radio. Recorded in 1992, Warsaw, Studio PR. Courtesy of Polish Radio.

The post Magnetic Tape as Instrument: A Rare Selection of Electroacoustic Music from Poland appeared first on post.

The Studio, which quickly became an outpost for electroacoustic music east of the Iron Curtain, was many things. Officially, it was established as a utilitarian unit intended to produce incidental music for Polish Radio broadcasts as well as soundtracks for films. Set up only few years after similar experimentally-oriented radio units in Paris (1948), Cologne (1951) and Milan (1955), it was also there to provide contemporary music composers access to the state-of-the-art equipment for the production of their autonomous electroacoustic pieces. Physically, it was a medium-size room in one of the many corridors of the headquarters of the Radio, crammed with gear, which its everyday inhabitants referred to as the “black room”. Design-wise, however, this tight space was meticulously planned out by Oskar Hansen, Poland’s leading architect, together with Zofia Hansen, linking the musical endeavors of the studio to a wider artistic scene. Indeed, the charm and the influence of Polish Radio Experimental Studio extended far beyond the 300 square feet of the physical space.

Under the direction of the Studio’s founder, Józef Patkowski, PRES became a laboratory for experimentation, whose influence extended into most if not all public aspects of Polish musical life: Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, of which Patkowski was program committee member; Warsaw Music Workshops (co-organized by John Tilbury), whose concerts Radio broadcasted; Polish Music Publications based in Cracow, which together with PRES co-published musical scores of the previously produced pieces, simultaneously releasing them on vinyls (sic!). Patkowski was also the Polish contact person for George Maciunas and the Fluxus movement, who was supposed to contribute to the never realized Eastern European Fluxus Yearbook. He helped organizing the (in)famous Fluxus East Tour that in 1964 Eric and Tony Andersen took from Copenhagen to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Soviet Union, during which they gave concerts and distributed Fluxus materials and ephemera. As a result, Warsaw of the 1960s was inscribed into the history of Fluxus as the cultural entry point to the whole of the Soviet Block. In fact, around a third of a close to a hundred composers who worked in the studio over the course of its existence came from abroad. As such, PRES can be seen as critical hub for international exchange.

Here, post presents the history Polish Radio Experimental Studio and a sampling of the works it produced in its first three decades, a period that coincides roughly with Józef Patkowski’s directorship (1957–1985). Using the opportunities offered by the digital publishing platform, we will feature original audio and video recordings together with reprints of scores and documentary photographs, next to newly commissioned essays, an interview and bibliography. In order to fully engage with the time-based character of an internet publication, we are going to release new materials gradually over the period of next three months. You can “folllow” this theme to get informed about new additions, and to add comments and links of your own.

“Polish Radio Experimental Studio: A Close Look”, prepared in partnership with Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, is based on resources from various archives made available by generous institutions and individuals. The presentation is part of C-MAP’s efforts to bring the often underrepresented histories of the Central and Eastern European neo-avant-gardes to a wider audience; but also to take a close look at materials and media still all too rarely exhibited and studied in art museums.

This theme was developed in partnership with Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (MSŁ). It was edited by Magdalena Moskalewicz, MoMA with Daniel Muzyczuk, MSŁ. The original content items in this theme are listed below.

The Future Sound of Warsaw: Introduction to PRES

Daniel Muzyczuk 

Magnetic Tape as Instrument: A Rare Selection of Electroacoustic Music from Poland

Magdalena Moskalewicz

Polish Radio Experimental Studio: A Galaxy of Writings, Prints, and Sound

Bolesław Błaszczyk

How much Rudnik is in Penderecki, and how much Rudnik is in Nordheim? Interview with Eugeniusz Rudnik

Daniel Muzyczuk and Eugeniusz Rudnik

Alchemist Cabinet of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio: Music Scores of and for Experiments

Michał Libera

Spatial Music: Design and the Polish Radio Experimental Studio

David Crowley

Colors of Joy and Sadness: Polish Electronic Music in Service to Cinematography

Agnieszka Pindera

Music for Film from Polish Radio Experimental Studio

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Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around.
[John Cage]

Arranging flowers takes place in silence.

Arranging flowers in Sogetsu ikebana, founded in 1927 by Sofu Teshigahara and considered the most experimental of all schools of the traditional Japanese art of flower composition, is no different in this respect.

There might have been a visible – or rather, audible – difference in the 1960s, however. Then, while the ikebana students were gathered in their classrooms, diligently and noiselessly following the centuries-old guidelines for the proper alignment of stems with leaves and buds, other young Japanese just three floors below them were vigorously attempting to break every rule of composition: this time, musical.

The Sogetsu Ikebana building, a gem of modernist architecture designed by Kenzo Tange, was completed in 1957 and now, sadly, no longer exists. It was comprised of two complementary but very different sets of spaces. The three floors that rose above ground housed the school’s offices and classrooms, while underground lay a vast auditorium and concert hall. It was in the latter that events and concerts of the Sogetsu Art Center, the school’s sister institution founded by Sofu’s son, Hiroshi, took place.

The seemingly irreconcilable tension between these two spaces is the subject of this project by Katarzyna Krakowiak, who investigates the inconspicuous relationships between sound and architecture. The artist is fascinated by how the noiselessness of the school’s upper rooms, where noble women (ikebana was originally a leisure activity for the wealthy) spent hours contemplating the forms of roots and petals, must have been contaminated by echos of sound produced by the experimental musicians working below. The contrast between their exuberant noise-making and the aura of silence and reticence, handed down by generations of ikebana practitioners, triggers imagination. Krakowiak probes this tension in two visual models that she designed on the basis of archival photographs of the building, now destroyed.

In one model, she imagines the reverberations of sounds produced during concerts entering the upper rooms of the Ikebana school in the form of multicolored spheres. The shapes are dispersed from the stage, where the music was produced, and travel toward the back of the auditorium, bouncing against the walls, with a few penetrating the staircase. In the second model, Krakowiak takes us on a soundless journey through the modernist building’s empty spaces, following the path of the reverberations. Performing a Gordon Matta-Clark-like gesture in her digital visualization, she cuts a hole through all the floors, down to the ground, allowing the ikebana and the concert hall spaces to directly interact. Krakowiak treats the upper spaces of the classrooms and the lower auditorium as resonating chambers, visually simulating how these two very different sound environments could have affected each other. This mute visualization of sound dispersal was prompted by ikebana itself: its meticulously choreographed set of hand movements, where silence is a method, rather than a mere lack of sound.

Text by Magdalena Moskalewicz. This project was commissioned by Magdalena Moskalewicz and post editorial team as an artist’s response to the Sogetsu Art Center, alongside a number of other contributions to the site on this subject.

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While the most comprehensive collection of works by Gorgona artists is held by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, extensive research by MoMA curators has led to the acquisition of a significant number of pieces for the Museum’s collection. These include a complete set of the magazine Gorgona as well as numerous important works by Dimitrije Basicević Mangelos and Josip Vaništa. After C-MAP trips to Zagreb and Belgrade, we invited the art historian Jesa Denegri, an expert on the group and a personal friend of many of its members, to join us for an intensive seminar at MoMA. Together we viewed the Museum’s Gorgona holdings and engaged in conversations about the group’s lasting importance.

Below you will find the transcription of Denegri’s presentation to the C-MAP Fluxus Group at MoMA in December 2012, together with the discussion that followed. Denegri describes the difficult-to-define character of Gorgona activities, discusses the group’s involvement with both the Yugoslav and international art scenes, highlights the changing reception of the group’s work, and points to the difficulties of producing a concise narrative about its history.

Magdalena Moskalewicz

What is (was) Gorgona Group?
In this talk I wish to give a brief presentation on the phenomenon known as Gorgona Group and to situate it in the context of its time in the former Yugoslavia. Gorgona Group was an artists’ collective that existed in Zagreb, Croatia, between 1959 and 1966. Its core members were the painters Josip Vaništa (1924), Julije Knifer (1924–2000), Marijan Jevšovar (1922–1998), and Đuro Seder (1927); the sculptor Ivan Kožarić (1921); architect Miljenko Horvat (1935–2012), who also worked as a painter and photographer; and the art historians and critics Radoslav Putar (1929–1994), Matko Meštrović (1933), and Dimitrije Bašičević (1921–1987), who was later active in the group as an artist and used the pseudonym Mangelos. Several informal members and friends were also involved in the group’s activities.

Gorgona Group took its name from a verse in a poem by Dimitrije Bašičević that was published as a preface to the graphics portfolio Elualija. It refers to the eponymous monster from Greek mythology that petrified with a single look anyone who came face to face with it. Although the name was chosen randomly, it later became evident that it fit very well with the fundamental mentality of this small community of artists and intellectuals brought together under the specific historical and social circumstances that prevailed during its brief existence.

Gorgona Group’s beginnings and first public appearances
Avant-garde movements and postwar, neo-avant-garde artists’ groups usually formed around commonly proclaimed or implied principles, but this was not the case with Gorgona Group. The group’s exact founding date is unknown, and as Nena Dimitrijević, the first historian to study the group, has indicated, Gorgona wasn’t exactly active—it just existed. The above-mentioned artists and art critics met occasionally, but rarely all together. They socialized and went for walks in the center or outside of town without any defined plans or conclusions . They talked spontaneously about seemingly insignificant topics from their day-to-day lives and exchanged opinions about books they had read, but they never discussed their artistic preoccupations and professional activities, since these remained the sovereign right of each individual. They also exchanged written notes, called “thoughts for the month,” which were sent by post even though they could have been exchanged in person far more quickly and easily. Josip Vaništa was the originator of these gatherings of a few friends. They would meet in his apartment or his office at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb, where he worked as an assistant lecturer in drawing.

Gorgona’s existence became known within Zagreb’s artistic milieu sometime in the early spring of 1961, when a magazine bearing the group’s name was distributed free of charge, literally from hand to hand, without previous notice. The first issue was the work of Vaništa, and an issue by Knifer followed soon afterwards. The publication was later defined as an “anti-magazine” to underline its difference from conventional types of literary and art journals. Still later, the individual issues would be called artist’s books or “books as artworks.” In his recollections of the beginnings of what was even for him an unforeseeable adventure, Vaništa describes anecdotally how this seemingly absurd undertaking came about. In time, its far-reaching historical and artistic significance would become evident:

“In the winter of 1960, while passing by a second-hand store in Vlaška Street right across from the Studio movie theater, I spotted an unknown object in the shop window: a vertical plank connecting four horizontal planks. It was a spatial structure without purpose being offered for sale. Perpendicular winter lighting fell on the display, and the object cast a shadow on the light background wall. I stood fascinated, probably because of the closeness between the scene before me and the still-life from the ’50s in which I had divided interior from exterior by placing a vertical line in the middle. I asked my friend Pavel Cazjek for a favor, and the next morning we photographed this shop window. I decided to repeat the photo nine times. I made a model, had it printed, and the first issue of Gorgona appeared during Easter week of 1961 (as did issue 2, a meander by Julije Knifer). This was the beginning of Gorgona . . . The first two issues seemed to link the group more closely together. Ideas were born but few of them were materialized, realized. The environment was in consternation, but sympathetic individuals began to emerge within the country and abroad.”

More issues of the anti-magazine Gorgona followed. In 1961, they were created, respectively, by Jevšovar, Victor Vasarely, Kožarić, and again Vaništa. Then came a break until 1965, when issues by Horvat and Harold Pinter came out. Nineteen sixty-six saw the publication of one number by Dieter Roth and two—the last in the Gorgona series—by Vaništa: a total of eleven issues. Some ideas and projects were left unrealized, as can be seen in the correspondence with potential authors such as Lucio Fontana, Robert Rauschenberg, Piero Manzoni, and Enzo Mari. In Vaništa’s Gorgona archive, two Manzoni proposals titled “Tavole di accertamento” are kept as particularly valuable and now have the status of some sort of manually created unicum; they were to have been printed editions of a multiplied art object.

A series of group and solo exhibitions of works by members and their guests was organized by Gorgona between 1961 and 1963. Foreign artists François Morellet and Piero Dorazio, both of whom participated in the first exhibition of the international New Tendencies movement in Zagreb in 1961, were included. Their solo shows were privately organized in Studio G, a small frame shop in the very center of town that was rented for an insignificant fee. The organizers’ aim was to realize their exhibition program independently of the influence and control that were being imposed upon state-run social and cultural institutions . The exhibitions at Studio G could be distinguished from other exhibitions in town on first glance. Only one work (such as Knifer’s famous Meander in the Corner, 1962) or merely a few were shown, contrary to the customary overcrowded displays in most other solo or group exhibitions. All visible manifestations of Gorgona Group (the eponymous anti-magazine and exhibitions organized by the group) thus stood out from their surroundings. They were, in a word, detached from the prevailing spiritual climate of their environment. From this we can deduce that “Gorgona behavior” was a fully conscious and far-reaching strategy of silent contestation. Seemingly passive on the outside, such behavior was essentially a persistent and defiant form of resistance on behalf of not only artistic but also total individual freedom.

Characteristics of paintings and sculptures by Gorgona Group members
One of the paradoxes of Gorgona Group, which was made up of prominent Croatian artists of two generations (young and middle-aged) and a trio of influential art critics, is that it was almost completely unknown on the cultural scene in which it was embedded. This situation continued until the group’s first historical reevaluation in a retrospective at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 1977. Thus, the question arises: what is Gorgona Group’s legacy? Is it limited to the eponymous anti-magazine, to exhibitions and other manifestations of “Gorgona behavior,” or does it include the members’ artistic productions? In other words, are the paintings and sculptures of Gorgona Group members an integral part of the group’s overall legacy, or are they the personal expressions of its individual members? We are inclined to accept the first proposition. All of the work created by members of Gorgona Group during the group’s existence, including individual bodies of painting and sculpture, is part of the group’s legitimate legacy. All Gorgona Group artists created works with distinctly non-iconic characteristics. Jevšovar, Seder, and Horvat painted in the spirit of radical Informel; Knifer’s painted black-and-whites meander, with their barely perceptible variations, and Vaništa’s horizontal lines in the midst of two-dimensional backgrounds suggest unique strains of Minimalism; Kožarić’s sculptures and Mangelos’s objects conform to no classical definition of sculpture, establishing parameters valid only for themselves. All of these artists worked entirely outside the prevailing aesthetic of moderate modernism that was then dominant in the local production of painting and sculpture. They veered from it even more significantly in their profound mentality than in the external characteristics of their formal language—as if to create a direct reflection of their ideological positions.

Gorgona Group’s modalities of dematerialized art
If it is possible to debate whether the painting and sculpture production of individual Gorgona Group members rightfully belongs to Gorgona Group’s overall legacy, it is indisputable that Gorgona Group’s collective art practice encompassed activities that did not result in tangible, material art objects. These activities included collective gatherings (such as the “collective reviews” at the beginning of spring or in the fall); performances (such as Adorations at the opening of Julije Knifer’s exhibition in 1966); communication via post between group members (such as the “thoughts” for certain months of the year); intellectual games without rules or final outcomes; photographs of various situations; newspaper ads with real or fictive notices; the mailing of notes in which no sense or purpose can be discerned (such as an invitation that says “Please attend” but gives neither time nor place); records of “collective works” by Gorgona Group members that could not and were not meant to be carried out in reality; “impossible projects” proposed mostly by Kožarić; records of Gorgona Group meetings written by Putar in an ancient, obsolete language and with an ironic subtext, etc. No one outside the group understood any of this as art at the time that it was being carried out. That recognition came only much later, and was largely thanks to the promulgation of the theories of the dematerialization of art and art in an expanded field. The term “art” itself has become so conditional and flexible that it is definitively being invalidated today, and all strict boundaries between what art undoubtedly is or could potentially be are lost.

Gorgona Group within national and international contexts
Gorgona Group’s national context comprised the social, political, and cultural circumstances in Yugoslavia midway through the twentieth century. In the visual arts, the complex process of adopting the enforced, repressive style of Socialist Realism—after the Soviet model—took place under the strained circumstances of the Cold War. Then, in 1948, due to the political break between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union caused by a Cominform resolution, came the gradual transition to a more tolerant cultural and artistic climate, which resulted in a steady opening up to the West. This significantly benefited the appearance and affirmation of different vocabularies in postwar modernism.

The far-reaching transformation of the artistic situation was prompted by the strategy of Yugoslavia’s foreign policy to balance on the border between East and West, with an increasingly apparent inclination towards the West. One of the results of this transformation was the establishment of an institutionalized art system in which, sometime during the mid-1950s, the new mainstream would take the form of what in recent literature has been dubbed “socialist modernism.” A series of spectacular foreign art exhibitions held in major cities of the former Yugoslavia served as significant levers for the functioning of the “socialist modernist” art system. They included Contemporary French Art in 1952, a solo exhibition by Henry Moore in 1955, Contemporary American Art from the collection of the Modern Museum of Art in New York in 1956, and numerous others. At the same time, Yugoslavia was regularly represented in international events such as the contemporary art biennials in Venice, São Paolo, and Tokyo, to mention only the most important. On the occasion of the exhibition Contemporary Yugoslav Art in Paris in 1961, French critic Michel Ragon wrote the following praise, pinpointing the difference between Yugoslav art and art in countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain: “In Yugoslavia, living art is also official art.” Striving to strengthen not only political and economic but also cultural relations with the West, the regime of Socialist Yugoslavia added to its strategic plans and objectives the principle of freer development and material support for contemporary modernist art. The controversial question remains as to which artistic expressions and their creators were favored by and sought to benefit from these changes and privileges. Individually and collectively, Gorgona Group members did not, nor did they strive to. The characteristics of so-called “socialist aestheticism”—the soft” or “middle” line of contemporary art in Yugoslavia in the initial postwar decades—cannot be found in their art. Nena Dimitrijević has presented a convincing account of the aims of Gorgona Group and its detached position within Yugoslavia’s art space:

“Gorgona was in the process of seeking spiritual and intellectual freedom, the realization of which was an end in itself. Outside the professional responsibilities of artistic production and promoting itself and its colleagues in the hierarchy of the local art scene, this group was motivated to gather and communicate solely by the prospects of spiritual unity and kinship. Regardless of the differences between their individual creative concepts, group members were unified by their shared embrace of the spirit of modernism, which is defined by the recognition of absurdities, emptiness, and monotony as aesthetic categories, and a tendency towards nihilism and metaphysical irony. From a contemporary standpoint it might seem that these spiritual coordinates insufficiently specify the sphere of action of an art group, but at the time of Gorgona Group’s emergence, Yugoslav art was dominated by completely opposite values and critera, and the group’s vital energy smoldered as it opposed the artistic establishment of that time.”

Gorgona Group’s international context was the global art situation in the early 1960s, with phenomena such as American Neo-Dada, Minimalism, Fluxus, Paris New Realism led by Yves Klein, the German group Zero, and Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani’s magazine/gallery Azimuth/Azimuth in Milan. The artistic practices of individual Gorgona Group members, developed at approximately the same time, exhibited certain similarities with those of their colleagues abroad. Parallels in time are noticeable between Gorgona Group and the Situationist International, which published twelve issues of their eponymous magazine between 1958 and 1969. Both of these groups strove in extremely different manners for the emancipation of the individual. This was also the time of the revival of Marcel Duchamp and his concepts of the readymade, the priority of artistic intention, and the recognition that art is primarily mental rather than optical and retinal. Certain Gorgona Group members were familiar with all of these contemporaneous developments, learning about them through specialist journals, firsthand experience, and by word of mouth. They yearned and strove to establish connections with their spiritual kin abroad. Vaništa invited Fontana, Manzoni, and Rauschenberg to contribute to their anti-magazine, Gorgona, and sent newly published issues to numerous addresses around the world. Contemporary literature read in translation or, less frequently, in the original, played a special part in the intellectual formation and spiritual development of most of Gorgona Group’s members.They were well-versed in the existentialist works of Sartre and Camus and in the French nouveau roman, and they particularly appreciated ancient far-eastern philosophy. They followed the Theater of the Absurd of Beckett and Ionesco, knew about the music of John Cage, attended screenings of avant-garde films, and visited experimental film festivals. It can be concluded that the advanced culture of the contemporary era was the spiritual nourishment of Gorgona Group’s members. Accordingly, artists affiliated with the group considered themselves full citizens of the world, on an equal footing with their counterparts in other cultures.

Relationship Gorgona Group – New Tendencies
Three members of Gorgona Group—Putar and Meštrović as organizers and Knifer as an exhibitor—were involved the first exhibition of the international New Tendencies movement, held at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 1961. This fact inevitably elicits the following question: why did they participate in this exhibition, and what exactly was their share in the subject matter of this exhibition? When considering this question, it is important to bear in mind that three artists from the German group Zero—Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker—and two artists from Milan’s Azimuth—Manzoni and Castellani—were among the show’s prominent participants. This information leads us to conclude that in terms of characteristics of expression, the first New Tendencies exhibition in Zagreb was closer to the spiritual mentality of Gorgona Group than to the Neo-Constructivist orientation of technological enthusiasm that would dominate subsequent Zagreb exhibitions, from the second edition in 1963 to the fourth in 1968–69, at which the use of computers in artistic research was introduced. In a letter to Meštrović of June 10, 1961, Manzoni expressed concern that the spiritual kin and followers of Max Bill and Bruno Munari, exponents of the strict geometry of so-called Concrete art linking art and industrial design, could leave an undesirable ideological mark on the exhibition. Manzoni’s fears did not materialize. Within the complex history and ideological turmoil of the New Tendencies movement, Manzoni’s first exhibition could be labeled a Gorgona exhibition if only for its share of Gorgona participants, among other things. Only at the following New Tendencies exhibitions did the issue of the relation between art, science, and new technologies prevail, as the demand for the “scientification of art” was for the most part accepted, except, of course, by Gorgona Group.

Gorgona Group’s historical reevaluation and international affirmation
How did an artistic phenomenon barely known in its own surroundings not only achieve historical r-evaluation on the local art scene but also significant international affirmation? It began with a retrospective at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 1977 and a text by Nena Dimitrijević in the accompanying catalogue, and continued with the group members’ appearances at the Museum of Modern Art in Mönchengladbach that same year. They were included in the São Paolo Biennale in 1981, in a retrospective in Dijon in 1989, and, under the name Gorgona Gorgonesco Gorgonico, within the framework of the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997. Work by the Gorgona Group was acquired for the Arteast collection of the Modern Gallery in Ljubljana in 2001, and the group is the subject of a monograph by Marija Gattin that was published by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 2002. The most important indices of Gorgona Group’s international affirmation are its inclusion in the exhibitions Aspects/Positions. 50 Years of Art in Central Europe 1949–1999 at the Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna in 2000; in Eye on Europe: Prints, Books & Multiples, 1960 to Now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2006; and in Promises of the Past: A Discontinuous History of Art in Former Eastern Europe at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2010. Finally, the group is mentioned in Vitek Havranek’s text “Yves Klein et l’Europe de L’Est, un oeuvre à l’état d’idée 1959–1971” in the catalogue for the Yves Klein retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2007.

Individual performances by certain Gorgona Group members, both during the artists’ lifetimes and posthumously, within the country and abroad, should be mentioned as well. It should be emphasized in particular that Gorgona Group first received meaningful recognition during the ascendancy of Conceptual art, and that this initial recognition was accorded by artists and critics familiar with that new art form. The historical reevaluation and international affirmation of Gorgona Group presents an illuminating example of the way in which a change in artistic paradigm can enable an obscure recent phenomenon to achieve proper understanding and precise placement in the context of its own surroundings, as well as on a global scale.

Josip Vaništa’s notes on Gorgona Group
Josip Vaništa’s notes on Gorgona Group from 1961 include the following:

“Gorgona Group’s idea is serious and brief. Gorgona Group does not seek works or results in art, it defines itself as a collection of potential interpretation.
“In 1961, Gorgona Group was fleeing from then-powerful Communism to the irrational, incomprehensible. Gorgona Group’s inaction was noticeable. A few young people whose mutual affection was the decisive factor for connecting met occasionally. Gorgona Group did not have a message! It was a particular type of action, self-ironic, it gave off a feeling of strangeness. Maybe it brought something new, maybe it only resolved its problems in life, anxious feelings. Maybe it did not leave behind anything but friendship and spiritual kinship.”

“Gorgona Group’s aspirations were oriented towards a reality outside aesthetics. Reflective restraint, passivity and indifference were above the naked, ironic denial or the world we lived in. No importance was attached to work, activities were very simple: going for walks together outside town, for example, ‘commission inspection of the beginning of spring,’ as Putar used to say jokingly, ordinary conversations in nature. Sometimes, Gorgon Group did not do anything, it was only living. Like the others, I was interested in the emptiness of Zen at that time, I sought normal behavior, normal life in an ideologically imbued world.”

“Gorgona Group was mere participation in an existence into which it brought a few dark ingredients: absurdity, emptiness. Gorgona Group was not a group of painters. It manifested itself through conversation, ideas, some realizations, with the help of the written word when nothing else could be done.”

Gorgona Group had no theory or poetics, and least of all an ideology. Vaništa’s cited notes are merely an indication by the group’s ideological and organizational leader of his own understanding of Gorgona Group or what it might be. The other Gorgona Group members did not leave even this much about it. However, when an attempt is made to gather and collect all the threads about and related to Gorgona Group, a notion of this highly unusual artistic and above all existential formation nevertheless starts to appear.

What then, after all, is (was) Gorgona Group?
An understanding of the phenomenon that was Gorgona Group did not come about suddenly. It emerged gradually over time, filled in by testimony and assessments of all those who left their opinions, memories, and interpretations—its initiator, a few of the other members and the art historians who took an interest. But it’s as if some elusive and not fully noticeable aura still hovers above this enigma. Gorgona Group was certainly not an art group in any declarative sense. Rather, it was a spiritual and intellectual community that formed in a certain period of its members’ lives. They were artists and art historians close to each other, linked by a shared worldview that arose from the social and spiritual conditions in the time and place of their existence. Within their cramped living conditions, a few young people recognized each other, became close, gathered, socialized, drifted away, and finally, by force of the law of existence, parted. What remained were material traces and intellectual currents that are worth decoding and qualifying using the instruments of art history. When art history will have to account for postwar avant-garde movements in Croatia’s art scene, it will recognize them in two successive waves: in the group EXAT 51 at the beginning, and in Gorgona Group at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. EXAT 51 was a typical neo-avant-garde phenomenon. It came out with a manifesto, in which it revealed its program advocating the legitimacy of abstraction within the socio-political context of Socialist Realism, then the ruling ideology that was averse to this art. EXAT 51 thus drew polemical reactions of acceptance and rejection. It proposed a synthesis of art, architecture, and industrial design in the wake of the achievements of the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism. It was a characteristic upshot of the enthusiastic and optimistic spiritual climate of the “reconstruction and development” of the social society shortly after the terrible devastation of World War II. Having emerged towards the end of the same decade in significantly different spiritual circumstances, Gorgona Group was the opposite of EXAT in many ways. It did not advocate any collectivist ideals or goals; moreover, it was distrustful of mobilizing utilitarian projects. Rather than aspiring to integrate art and the artist into society, Gorgona members felt that the only thing left to the artist was a belief in art’s absolute autonomy.

Gorgona Group did not accept, but neither did it oppose the standards of the social order in which it emerged. It treated that order fatalistically. It wanted to stand beyond and outside all ruling ideological postulates, finding refuge only in the art created by its members, which they believed in. “Maybe Marijan Jevšovar,” notes Vaništa in his notes on Gorgona Group, “was the closest to the truth when he said that Gorgona Group members behaved as if they were not living under Communism.” Gorgona Group members were not rebels, and they were certainly not political dissidents. They were proud loners gathered in a small intellectual community that privileged a mindset that could tentatively be called “active escapism.” The means of expression of such a mentality were, among other things, irony, measured humor, distanced, casual, mutual respect, with reciprocal giving and taking, refined behavior in relations within and outside the group. If all of these different characteristics were reduced to one, we could say that Gorgona artists were skeptics, people who were not carried away by activism but who were nevertheless quite persistent and consistent in their fundamental beliefs. Gorgona artists were actually loners, but loners who wanted to share their loneliness with others similar and close to them. Their ideal was, above all, the freedom of art. All Gorgona Group members believed in this ideal and were utterly devoted to it, each in his and her own way. Apart from free existence in art, Gorgona artists did not expect or seek anything. Theirs was an art without confession, an art that doesn’t preach but simply exists and survives as an inseparable part of human existence. Thanks to this art, they have been recognized both locally and internationally, and information about them that was once scattered has been gathered into a whole. Today, Gorgona Group is a unique, historically affirmed artistic fact.

Discussion

Christian Rattemeyer: Given the argument that you have laid out about the relationship between Gorgona as a group and the work of its individual members, and given the paradox between the sort of immaterialization of the gesture and the works that remain by individual artists, how would you represent Gorgona in the best possible way?

Jesa Denegri: This is a crucial point in understanding Gorgona. There is a belief that what makes Gorgona are the eleven anti-magazines and all the conversations, walks, thoughts of the day—everything that was mentioned in the text, everything the members were doing, all their different actions. And this is one way of looking at things, one way of defining it. This could be Gorgona. On the other hand, each of the members of Gorgona, each individual, had his own activity, artistic production, and artistic practice as a painter or sculptor. And these practices were very artistic. For example, Julije Knifer was a painter, Ivan Kožarić was a sculptor, and many other Gorgona members were writers. I would say that all this forms different parts of Gorgona: both the artists’ individual practices and their activities as a group. Because ultimately, all the activities of Gorgona, including the works that the artists were producing, were very distinct. They were completely different from the other artistic practices in Yugoslavia at the time, and they influenced the country’s artistic production.

We could say that some of the paintings of the Gorgona members, for example Jevšovar, could be part of the Informel movement. However, if you come closer, if you observe more carefully, you notice there is actually a big difference. I will describe one of Jevšovar’s paintings just to give you an example. It’s a gray surface half a meter [20 inches] in length. And the title is: Gray surface 1960–1962. You could ask: was it necessary to cover the surface with gray paint over a period of two years when it could have been done in twenty minutes? But actually, what this is about is that the color was applied to the surface and then removed, applied and removed. So there is a repetition of the gesture of application and removal. Thus, more conceptual, theoretical questions arose: When was the painting done? When was it over? When is the moment when the artist decides that the work, in this case the painting, is finished, and when is he ready to show it to the gallery, to the collector, to the museum? Behind this very simple gesture lie very complex and multilayered thinking and reflection about the painter’s gesture and the painting itself.

Another important and interesting example is Vaništa’s painting with the silver line in the middle. There is a specific formula, we could say, for this painting. The formula says the painting is 140 high by 180 centimeters wide [approximately 55 by 71 inches], and there is a silver line 3 centimeters [1 inch] thick running through it. This textual instruction was created before the painting was executed.

I could give you plenty of similar examples, particularly related to Julije Knifer, who is one of the biggest painters, not only in the Gorgona group. There are special, more mental and optical-visual characteristics to Knifer’s paintings. In a way, this could be a conclusion, an answer and conclusion to your question: Jevšovar could not be understood in the context of Informel. Knifer cannot really be shown with the Minimalists, although it is possible. But all this production—it is Gorgona. Because it is deeply different from the artistic production and art activities of the other artists of the time, and it has fewer mental and auto-referential characteristics.

If one should make an ideal retrospective of Gorgona . . . When this monograph that I am preparing will be ready, all these objects will be represented: the magazines, manifestos, also paintings, sculptures, and in the case of Mangelos, also his globes. Mangelos is one of the most interesting phenomena not only within Gorgona but in contemporary art in general. When Gorgona was active, he was one of the most prominent art critics and curators. He was the curator of the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, and he was working in the group anonymously.

Christian Rattemeyer: I was wondering what you make of the difficulty posed by the amount of time that sometimes intervenes between the execution of a work and its presentation—for instance, Vaništa’s tendency to remake a work ten, fifteen, or twenty years later, and still give it the original date.

Jesa Denegri: The idea for a work could have originated during the Gorgona time, and the work might have been executed many years later, numerous times. This is why there are sometimes doubts about dating Gorgona’s activities and also some works by the members of Gorgona. For example, Mangelos and his black surfaces with little red crosses: they were made as early as in the 1940s, so if we place them in their artistic or art historical context, they could be placed next to the black paintings of Rodchenko or Reinhardt. But is not a question of creating a black surface. During the war, in the 1940s, these works were for Mangelos a very intimate confession, in a way. It was a confession about the victims of the war, his closest friends, who lost their lives. This production, or that production of that time, doesn’t have the characteristics of something that is supposed to be shown or exposed or exhibited. This came up during the discussion about who did the first black surface, or who did it second or in which context. So for each of the members of Gorgona we could tell different stories that testify to the primacy of the mental and the conceptual over the formal. That’s why I think that everything that was ever done by the members of Gorgona is today a part of Gorgona’s legacy.

Christophe Cherix: Is this not a different situation in the case of Vaništa? We saw some of Vaništa’s sketchbooks from the late 1940s when he was is Vienna, and what’s troubling is that you have the same line drawings, the exact same composition that he would make later as a member of the Gorgona group. Thus, it seems that the form came first.

Jesa Denegri: There is this origin of the horizontal in his drawings. So what you are saying is true, but at a particular moment there came a mental shift when he no longer perceived this line as the horizon line. There is an instruction that determines the structure of the drawing itself, so it is not the horizon line but the instruction that precedes it that is most important. And that is the tautology of the Gorgona, because . . . it is not the horizon line, but it is a line, just a line, just a silver-gray line.

Ana Janevski: If you are saying that today we should consider that every work of the individual members together form the legacy of Gorgona, what about the group’s 1977 exhibition?

Jesa Denegri: It is a very good question. Gorgona was officially historicized in 1977. It was Nena Dimitrijević, an art historian and the wife of Braco Dimitrijević, who wrote a text about the group for the 1977 exhibition in the city gallery in Zagreb. So Gorgona as we see it today, as we perceive it today, actually is the result of the art history, art historical work, but the important and necessary background was the Conceptual art at the end of the 1960s and also in the ’70s. Without this frame or the Conceptual, dematerialized art of the 1970s, without the art critics and curators like Nena Dimitrijević, Biljana Tomić, and others, we would never have had the perception or interpretation of Gorgona that we have today. And it is a very interesting issue from the point of view of art history and the historicization of art movements and art practices. It was necessary to have different shifts and different events in the art, in art history. Certain theoretical and methodological tools needed to be developed in order to read and to interpret Gorgona and the Gorgona phenomena.

The discussion was simultaneously translated between Croatian and English by Ana Janevski.

Tekst na hrvatskom možete pročitati ovdje.

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