Thursday 27 May 2010

polish performance art

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RECENT POLISH ART


Content:The eighties and the nineties | The "first" and "second" avant-gardes | The tradition of the colourists | The Krakow Group tradition | The tradition of Polish poster design | The folk art tradition | Post-modernism and the new media | The Church's exhibition spaces and religious themes | The preponderance of biography | The return of traditional genres | The political turning-point and art | Between the media and the body

The eighties and the nineties

Throughout the twentieth century, political changes have usually had an influence on fundamental changes in Polish art. The country's recovery of independence in 1918 and the birth of the Second Republic came at the time when innovative trends - and the avant-garde in particular - appeared in art. The early fifties was the period of socialist realism imposed on art by the Communist authorities, followed by the key date of 1955 which brought a political thaw after Stalin's death and saw the next turning point in Polish art, the introduction of the so-called "modern" strategies which held sway for much of the next quarter century. The emergence of Solidarity (1980) - the only independent trade union in the Communist bloc - and the years of martial law imposed by the Communist authorities, coincided with the tide of post-modernism sweeping over the whole of Western - and that included Polish - culture. And yet the political turning point of 1989, which brought with it the bloodless removal of the Communists and a change to a democratic system with the birth of the Third Republic, in contrast to previous tradition, though it produced certain changes in attitude of the artists did not have much influence on the nature of their art. As the Berlin wall fell and eastern Europe was liberated from the thrall of Communism - in which a key element had been the ten-year long resistance shown by Solidarity - so Polish art, though continuously and independently participating in the shaping of this Polish consciousness of the eighties seemed to stop taking an active interest in the development of political affairs. This is one of the main facets of Polish art in the nineties - which is also dominated by more experienced artists, at the least those of the middle generation whose debuts came in the eighties and whose work is deeply rooted in the traditions of the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde.

The "first" and "second" avant-gardes

The work of the artists who made their debuts in the eighties fundamentally changed and re-evaluated the artistic traditions which had been operating till then. Firstly, it changed the avant-garde tradition which was, and remains to this day, an exceptionally powerful influence on artists, predominantly thanks to the work of the married couple of the painter, designer and theoretician Władysław Strzemiński (1893-1952) and the sculptor Katarzyna Kobro (1898-1952). The concept of unism in Strzemiński's painting and of time-space rhythms in Kobro's constructions have been permanently etched into the classic European or "first" avant-garde. In Poland the main bastions of this classic avant-garde art have been two institutions which are still operating today: Muzeum Sztuki (The Museum of Art) in Łódź and Galeria Foksal (the Foksal Gallery) in Warsaw, the opening of which in 1966 was closely linked to the renewal of interest in the avant-garde during the sixties which led to the neo-avant-garde or "second" avant-garde.

Thanks to the artists who made their debuts in the eighties, not only was the classic avant-garde re-examined but the work of the neo-avant-garde artists revealed new aspects. Many young artists of this period, like the sculptors Mirosław Bałka (born 1958) and Krzysztof M. Bednarski (born 1953), drew on the social theories of the German sculptor Joseph Beuys, co-founder of the neo-avant-garde movement Fluxus, and on a dramatic interpretation of their material. In 1981 Joseph Beuys presented to the Łódź Museum of Art his collection of works entitled "Polentranstport", and this served to intensify interest in his work considerably.

It was in the eighties, too, that, following a period of oblivion brought about by the thrust of post-modernism in the late seventies, interest was renewed in the work of middle-generation Polish artists, linked to the neo-avant-garde of the sixties, with an acknowledged international reputation. The canvasses of Włodzimierz Pawlak (born 1957) used as a starting point for their painter's dialogue the work of Roman Opałka (born 1931), permanently resident in France. The black-and-white canvasses of Ryszard Winiarski (born 1936) "painted" according to the rules of chance theory became an important reference point for many young artists like Jerzy Truszkowski (born 1961) and Robert Maciejuk (born 1965). The richly varied art of Krzysztof Wodziczko (born 1943), who works mainly in North America and Western Europe, has influenced the socially oriented work of the young artists of the nineties.

The tradition of the colourists

The most pervasive - and perhaps because of that the most controversial - tradition in Polish art, that of the colourists, was also subjected, in the work of the succeeding generations of artists, not so much to alteration as to a kind of final acceptance. The painting of the Polish colourists of the twenty inter-war years, members of the Paris Committee (such as Jan Cybis, Jozef Czapski, Piotr Potworowski, Artur Nacht-Samborski, Zygmunt Waliszewski) who were pupils of Pierre Bonnard and the École de Paris, were condemned even before the war for their aestheticism, escapism and ostentatious pictorialism. The painterly "resolution" of a canvas as the Polish colourists' main artistic aim, with no consideration of its political or social context, their faith in an eternal art and its changeless questions, have proved to be surprisingly relevant, dramatically "ethical" and, indeed, political. As a result, the achievements of the colourists, though not free of a tendency to decorativeness, have become of permanent value to contemporary Polish painting.

A huge role in the assimilation of the work of the colourists was played by one of Poland's most important artists, the painter Stefan Gierowski (born 1925). In his extraordinary abstract paintings he combines the knowledge and awareness of the avant-garde with the sensitivity of the colourists and a moral premise which was such an important aspect for artists during the Communist servitude. In 1955 he participated in the exhibition at the Warsaw "Arsenal" which was a demonstration by the artistic youth of the time standing in judgement over the art that followed on from socialist realism not just from the standpoint of a new, albeit far removed from socialist realism, form of art but also from a standpoint referring to values that came from outside art, that came, above all, from the ethical dimension. The order of Nature, the harmony of composition, and moral order are all inextricable parts of Gierowski's canvasses. During the seventies he was the father figure for artists like Tomasz Ciecierski (born 1945), Łukasz Korolkiewicz (born 1948) and Edward Dwurnik (born 1943). This, now middle-generation, group of painters introduced to Polish art, after years of the dominance of colourist still-lifes and landscapes, or colourist abstracts, an intellectual, narrative form of painting, often with a philosophical underpinning. The high quality of these canvasses' painting and the discipline in Gierowski's works influenced the next generation, most notably the artists linked with the Gruppa in Warsaw, established in 1983 (Paweł Kowalewski, Ryszard Grzyb, Ryszard Woźniak, Włodzimierz Pawlak, Jarosław Modzelewski, Marek Sobczyk). However, Leon Tarasewicz (born 1957), another member of the eighties generation and a contemporary of the Gruppa painters, went right back directly to the colourists in his fascination with landscape and the material quality of his pigments.

The Krakow Group tradition

A separate tradition in contemporary Polish art is the one created in the post-war artistic circles in Krakow which organised the First Exhibition of Modern Art in Krakow in 1948 and which was, eventually, to be concentrated round the Krakow Group. The overpowering influence exerted on this group came from Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990), an individual creative artist of genius, arrogant, provocative, avant-garde though also battling against what he ironically referred to as "The Official Avant-Garde", a man like no other, because there could never be anyone else like him even in the whole of European art of the twentieth century. The artists of the Krakow Group are, above all, individualists who cannot be pigeon-holed with any group or into any -ism, though critics eagerly point to their preoccupation with surrealism. In the 1948 Exhibition, artists of exceptional significance to present-day Polish art took part, e.g. Jadwiga Maziarska (born 1913) and Jerzy Nowosielski (born 1923). Jadwiga Maziarska is one of the first exponents of the abstract painting of materials. Something akin to that can be seen in the phenomenon which is the work of Jerzy Nowosielski, a Uniate, a theologian, and a magnificent continuator of the tradition of icon painting in Poland. His abstracts, still-lifes and landscapes, as well as his decorations for Orthodox and Catholic churches, are, despite the variety of themes and the long time-span separating the works, always the same thing: a meditation on the spiritual dimension of reality. Nowosielski's work, and just as importantly his stance and theological erudition, have proved to be an important source of inspiration to many artists starting out in the last twenty years.

The tradition of Polish poster design

The momentary liberalisation in the Communist system during the late fifties saw a magnificent example of an explosion of "modernity", of which one wing was the Krakow Group. These were also the years in which the Polish school of poster art came into prominence, with Henryk Tomaszewski (born 1914) as its leading light, a poster art which was philosophical, brief, economic to the verge of abstraction yet, at the same time, harbouring ambitions of a wider social resonance. A natural consequence of the international success of Polish poster art was the opening (in 1968) of Muzeum Plakatu (The Poster Museum) in Warsaw, the first of its kind in the world, and the organisation (since 1966) of the Poster Biennale. The concept of visual communication shaped by poster designers in the fifties and sixties is still valid today. Many young artists like Piotr Młodożeniec (born 1956) or the painter and Gruppa member Marek Sobczyk (born 1955), refer to it willingly, extending it creatively into the nineties. The graphic artists Młodożeniec-Sobczyk, - known as "Zafryki" are among the most interesting phenomena in graphic arts of the nineties.

The work of the world-renowned artist Magdalena Abakanowicz (born 1930) is not part of any of the groups of younger artists. Her large-scale tapestries, her sculptures, installations and architectural designs have become a true mark of the export quality of Polish art. Abakanowicz's work is fired by the spirit of the fifties and sixties, that period of upheaval and "modern" experimentation. Her own individual understanding of form, space and the possibilities of combining techniques and materials are all very evident in her work.

The folk art tradition

One other aspect of contemporary Polish art that has to be mentioned, even though its scale and importance have diminished in recent years, is the presence in it of elements of folk culture in its broadest sense. Only two artists, Jerzy Bereś (born 1930) and Władysław Hasior (1928-1999), have succeeded in creating unusually interesting work inspired by Polish folk art and folk traditions. Beres creates slightly touristy, street market and absurdist wooden constructions which he often exploits in his own performance art. Hasior was fascinated by Polish myths, and from them he created slightly trashy but very evocative compositions based on the world-view of the average, small-town Pole.

Post-modernism and the new media

The artists who made their debuts in the eighties not only had to come to terms with the achievements and the heritage of Polish art in the twentieth century but they also had to participate in the continuing debate around post-modenism and develop their interest in the new media which had made great inroads into Polish art as early as the seventies. In 1970, Józef Robakowski (born 1939) had founded the Film Form Studio in Łódź which made structuralist films and subsequently experimental videos. It was from this studio that Zbigniew Rybczyński emerged, winner of the Oscar in 1983 for his animated film "Tango". It was also during the seventies that Zbigniew Warpechowski (born 1938), one of today's giants of European performance art, first found full expression for his work. And it was in the same period that Krzysztof Wodiczko, began his internationally acclaimed career based on the projection of specially prepared slides onto culturally meaningful buildings in cities throughout the world, thereby creating a specific political and cultural re-interpretation of them. In the last ten years, Wodiczko has been making prototype-objects "Pojazd dla bezdomnych / A Vehicle for the Homeless", "Laska tułacza / A Vagabond's Stick". These have established the artist's international reputation; he is now heavily involved in the avant-garde milieus of New York and Europe. With his philosophy, his particular visual resolutions, and the close attention he pays to the social context of his work, Wodiczko has been a model for many artists making their debuts in the nineties.

The Church's exhibition spaces and religious themes

One special aspect of Polish art in the eighties was its links with the Church. The Catholic Church in Poland was always in strong opposition to the Communist regime. The election in 1978 of the Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyła as Pope strengthened the Church's standing among artists and intellectuals who had, till then, been far from firm believers. Martial law proved to be a decisive factor in this period: it forced virtually the entire artistic community to boycott the official exhibition spaces. The only places which found approval among independent artistic and intellectual groups were places of worship, and that was where meetings, shows and exhibitions were held. Just about everyone participated in them, and only a very few steered away from religious themes believing, as they did, that any ethical or moral dimension in art is best expressed by its artistic quality and by profound artistic reasons, not through any specific, even "utterly laudable" themes. Such was the viewpoint of, for example, the artists of Gruppa. It must be noted, however, that this period was indeed marked by a truly profound interest in the whole question of the sacrum in art and by deep spiritual changes in many artists, including the youngest. It was in this time that the work of Jerzy Nowosielski revealed its full quality, with its thoughts on the subject of religious art. Always Catholic, though not always deeply so, Polish society exerted a great effort in the eighties to deepen its knowledge of the Church's teachings. This was true of the artists, too. And yet this profound spiritual experience was not extended into the next decade in any way or, at the best, in a very minimal way as in the work, for example, of Jerzy Kalina (born 1944) or Włodzimierz Pawlak (born 1957). Furthermore, when the political turning-point came in 1989, this general adherence to links with the Church became, for many artists, a good reason to break with it - and this was particularly true of radical circles - because it was regarded as a restraint not dissimilar to those imposed hitherto by the totalitarian regime.

The preponderance of biography

The artists who made their debuts in the eighties - and particularly the painters of Gruppa - were very strongly influenced by the work of the prematurely deceased painter Andrzej Wróblewski (1927-1957). Wróblewski's artistic journey from abstract to a not very interesting involvement in socialist realist art through to evocative, almost symbolic pictures of an autobiographical and existential character was peculiarly inspirational. The artists of the eighties had to contend with the till recently predominant avant-garde tendency, and they also wanted to preserve a separateness and independence of view from the prevailing "moral" demands during the difficult eighties - the years of oppression by the Communist regime, the years of censorship, of the uncertainties stemming from the imposition of martial law. That's why the artists' interest in biography became important during this decade: biography became a way out. A line from a poem by the outstanding Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, "be faithful - go", served as a slogan for a generation. Autobiography became a shelter and a starting-point for the work of numerous artists. Mirosław Bałka, in his diploma piece at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, presented a poetic version of his first Communion. Krzysztof Bednarski's "Moby Dick", a sculpture-installation which breaks through a wall of the exhibition space, echoes personal events and memories about his father. The same was true of painters. The expressionist tendency which came to the fore at a point in the mid-eighties, with its violent gestures, also drew on the primacy of biography, of personal experiences, on painters' autobiographical records, bearing witness to the painters' own identities - all these traits lacking in the art of the preceding decade which was dominated by experimental art. But it must be emphasised that the work of the young artists of the eighties was far from apolitical; but it was not overtly propagandist. Their involvement was often expressed by the use of colour contrasts in patches of paint, by meaningful titles, by the interpretation of a sign, and by frequent references to literature or to the cultural context.

The return of traditional genres

The young artists of the eighties had to deal with the art of the previous decade in the situation created by the imposition of martial law. Only in its more interesting manifestations did art resist the ambiguities of political interpretations. Often its experimental character was incomprehensible to a wider public and therefore very convenient for the authorities, and that provoked much criticism. As a consequence the young artists of the ensuing decade expressed a distrust of, or rather uncertainty about, the effectiveness of avant-garde models, and this was transformed into a general suspicion of any art given political endorsement. In this situation, the artists who made their debuts in the eighties drew closer to more "traditionalist" artists like Tomasz Ciecierski or Edward Dwurnik, whose apolitical canvasses, with their feuilleton-like character, contained within them a crushing analysis of the social and political situation in Poland, and of Polish culture. The need for irrefutable truth was metamorphosed into a need of irrefutably sovereign work.

That is how the eighties became the decade of a return to traditional genres in painting, sculpture, architecture and crafts. This was a natural, post-modern reaction against the transgression and blurring of boundaries between types and genres seen in the avant-garde. It was a return to the spring, to the foundations, to the first principles of art, questioning the meaning of a work of art. And, in the Polish situation, it was also a return to truly free work, not free in terms of experimentation, but free from political ambiguity. In this situation, the avant-garde ceased to be attractive as simply a formal proposition, as a concept of an artistic language, as an experiment acknowledging the new media. It became attractive because the young artists became aware of its significance and the possibilities it still offered in its attitude to art.

The political turning-point and art

The eighties, the decade of resistance, ended with fundamental changes in the country's cultural politics. They were not, however, received without some ambivalence. On the one hand, of course, artists were given the opportunity for extensive, free involvement without fear of censorship. On the other hand, however, the political and economic changes at the end of the eighties had a huge impact on the already impoverished artistic milieu. Despite censorship and repression, artists were assured of a minimum level of material security by the Communist state. This was lost when the free market arrived with democracy.

Overall, the rejection of the limitations imposed by a centrally-driven cultural system in which the ministry and the artists' unions subsidised artists and the specialist press, was greeted enthusiastically by the artists of the older and middle generations. The young artists, however, were completely uninterested in these organisational changes.

In fact, it was the artists making their debuts in the eighties who gained most from the post-1989 systemic and organisational changes. Wojciech Krukowski - artist and director of the Akademia Ruchu (Motion Academy) theatre, participant in the "Documenta" in Kassel - was appointed in 1989 as the new director one of the most important exhibition spaces for experimental art, the Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej (Centre for Contemporary Art) in Warsaw. Krukowski shaped the Centre's new profile in terms of its exhibitions, research programmes, and publications. The management of the most important exhibition space in Warsaw, Zachęta, also changed hands (Anda Rottenberg). In that same year a most important space on the map of art galleries was created, namely the private Starmach Gallery in Krakow. Those three continue to be the most influential exhibition spaces for the newest art in Poland to this day.

Along with the dismantling of the foundations of artistic life, came the arrival of artists who had no links with the training system operating till then, artists who were not graduates of the art schools, attendance at which had been, hitherto, an essential requirement for entry to a career as an artist. The kind of underground cultural life operating during the eighties was certainly conducive to the emergence of these changes which, in the nineties, became an important aspect of the artistic milieu.

Between the media and the body

It's against this background that the 1989 turning-point (the fall of Communism in Poland) and the choices associated with it made by Polish artists acquire a meaning and a proportion that demand explanation. The moment is interesting not because of its political significance - which is, after all, fairly obvious - but because it separates two artistic periods by ignoring the overpowering political circumstances of the time. While it separates political epochs, it also separates epochs in art which seems not to notice the political changes, blatantly ignoring them, seeking other sources of inspiration and confirmation, and noticing other changes to which the politicians are oblivious. Art seems to be saying something completely different from what the now free press are writing and the media are showing. For researchers and critics of contemporary Polish art this is an exceptionally interesting phenomenon. Polish art has stopped taking an interest in current affairs; it has, furthermore, jettisoned almost entirely the experiences of the preceding decade (its attitude to the Church, the return to traditional genres, the very distant but questioning attitude to politics).

At the turn of the decade, the political theme has appeared in a meaningful way only in the painting of Jerzy Truszkowski and in the monumental photography of Zofia Kulik (born 1947). In both cases we are presented with a display of the symbols of totalitarian regimes, playing with political rituals, with a consideration - especially in Kulik's work - of all kinds of totalitarianism.

The appearance of photographs in Zofia Kulik's works makes us aware of her drawing away from accepted conventions - the traditional canvas, or sculpture. The pull towards the new media (photography, videos, but also billboards, television, electronic transmission) seems to be one of the characteristic features of the art, not only Polish, of the last decade. It contains not just a fascination with means of transmission, but also an attempt to draw attention to the nature of the mass consciousness that is being shaped by them.

Stereotypes of mass consciousness have probably been most powerfully exploited in a work by Zbigniew Libera (born 1959) called "Klocki Lego / Lego Bricks" in which a child's toy is used to build concentration camps. The shallowness and the infantile nature of the social information conveyed by the mass and electronic media are the new subject of Polish art. In the eighties, television and the regime-backed press were treated with contemptuous silence, and ignored. In a free Poland the power of the means of mass communication which have no specific explanation of, or social consent to, the values which they would like adhere to when constructing a contemporary Polish consciousness, has instantly become an object of great interest to artists.

The omnipresence of the mass media, and of advertising, brought about by the violent development of the free market has meant that they have taken possession of the visual capacity to create images. The creation of pictures or images stopped being the special preserve of artists and became something done by advertising executives. Freedom became an element used in experiments to find more effective ways of influencing customers without questioning its purpose. This virtual reality, though many artists do find it fascinating, is not universally approved. Warsaw's Foksal Gallery appears to be oblivious to this new interest and stalwartly remains enclosed within the framework of traditional methods of expression, albeit in the avant-garde tradition. The avant-garde, however, and especially the "first" avant-garde, is no longer as important in the nineties as it was even as late as the eighties.

The preponderance of the electronic media, the interest they inspire, and the absence of painting are all striking features of art in the nineties. Even though painters of the previous decade - especially Edward Dwurnik, Włodzimierz Pawlak, Jarosław Modzelewski and Paweł Susid - often created their best works in the nineties, they did not rouse as much critical attention as they had till recently. It is hard to give an unequivocal reason for this state of affairs. It would seem that in today's world - in an age when traditional patterns are threatened by globalisation, when value hierarchies are being blurred by the dominant liberal ideology and when the autonomy and individuality of the artistic message is being undermined by advertisements, billboards, spots and clips - that the individual artist's manual and craftsmanlike dexterity would be in greater than ever demand. And yet the opposite is true. The painter's image has stopped having any of the political resonance it had in the post-1955 political thaw or in the eighties.

A good example of the changes taking place in Polish painting over the last two decades is the work of Leon Tarasewicz (born 1957). He has undergone a singular evolution from the very personal, monumental and synthesising landscapes which verged on the extremes of abstraction during the eighties, through to a painter's environment, spatial arrangements with an extraordinarily sensuous, almost sculptural treatment of pigment. It could be said that what is being shown here is a symbolic rejection of the biographical element in painting in favour of the physicality of paint, its biological dimension, and at the same time a more corporeal interaction between the spectator and the monumental painting.

It is indeed corporeality, an interest in the body, the body treated as a medium, the body in a cultural and biological context, that seems to be the other fulcrum, the counterweight to the stereotype proposed by the media, the counterweight to the virtual reality of the electronic media. Corporeality seems to be, from the artists' viewpoint, concrete art opposed to the non-concrete, abstract, global culture of the end of the twentieth century. The roots of this fascination with the body can be traced to the performance art of the late sixties and early seventies and particularly to the influence of the Repassage Gallery in Warsaw. Performance artists associated with the gallery included Włodzimierz Borowski (born 1930), Elżbieta Cieślar (born 1934) and above all the sculptor Grzegorz Kowalski (born 1942). During the nineties Grzegorz Kowalski's studio at the Academy of Fine Arts became a real nursery for artists involved in questions of the body, its exploitation, its the cultural limitations and its biological aspect. Paweł Althamer (born 1967) and Katarzyna Kozyra (born 1963), artists of acknowledged international renown, are the most important representatives of this trend.

The ideas propounded by the artists associated with Grzegorz Kowalski's studio are deliberately provocative and often extreme. They seem to draw on Joseph Beuys's ideas in which the substance and purpose of art lies in its social awareness and not so much in the material piece of work. Kowalski himself is prepared to concede that he is developing many of the ideas of the "moderns" of the fifties and above all of the architect Oskar Hansen (born 1922), a long-time lecturer at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and the author in 1959 of his "open form" theory. Grzegorz Kowalski points to the fact that the work of many of his students is reminiscent of the ideas propounded by the European situationists of the fifties and sixties. Of smaller significance to the achievements of Grzegorz Kowalski's studio are the works of the "art of the body" movement of the seventies in the West. There is no doubt that the art created by Kowalski's pupils has a clear Polish genesis and is a response to the country's cultural climate, and that the scandals associated with it can be put down to the extreme attitudes adopted by the artists towards faith, the Church, sex, or the value of social conventions.

In the majority of the important achievements coming out of this studio, however, radical methods are used for more sophisticated and more deeply argued cultural ideas. Katarzyna Kozyra won a prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999 for an installation using a video filmed by using a hidden camera in a men's bathhouse (she herself dressed up as a man); this work is notable for having been set within the context of traditional oriental bath-houses and the timeless theme of the nude. It is not unlike her earlier video-based installation "Olimpia" of 1996.

Mirosław Bałka "exploits" his own body rather differently, in a more intellectual manner though with an extraordinary sensitivity to the means employed (smell, temperature). In an installation at the Venice Biennale in 1992 he used the level, and heightened, temperature of his body while creating an arrangement employing methods typical of the minimal or poor art movement (Arte Povero) of the sixties.

Between the media and the body - that could be a shorthand way of describing Polish art in the period from 1991 to 2000. Instead of politics - which, though not obvious in the works of the artists of the eighties, clearly defined them - the subject matter of art has become civilisation as a whole. The specifically Polish context is virtually absent from Polish art. The devaluation of ideas about social cohesion, the painful price paid for the building of democracy, liberalism with its concept of unlimited freedom, the pauperisation of artistic milieus following the introduction of free-market principles, the lack of any kind of cultural policy of the state - all this has done little to encourage artists to participate in current events or to deal with them in their own art. There is in this also a sign of a new perception of the rôle of the artist and maybe even a new sensibility which is different from traditional ones.

Perhaps the memory of the dangers inherent in political restrictions is still so fresh, etched permanently into the minds of Polish artists, that it won't allow them even to suggest any kind of preferred cultural model for Poland. Is that why the political has been replaced by the civilisational context? Is this not the reason for the reluctance of artists to assess both the situation in which Polish culture finds itself and the challenges facing it on the eve of our planned entry into the European Union?

Author: Wojciech Włodarczyk.

List of some the most recent performance artists from Poland(1996-2006)
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