Poland

Cities

Bydgoszcz, Gdansk, Gdynia, Katowice, Kielce, Krakow, Lodz, Ploc, Poznan, Szczecin, Toruń, Warszawa, Wroclaw.

Artist groups

Arts and engineering groups and collectives in CEE#Poland

Experimental film, avantgarde film

Background

• early contributions to cinema were largely wiped out by World War II
• In the 1980s, martial law in Poland killed experimental film making, as access to equipment and facilities was denied. In its place, video thrived. Many new artists grew up with the medium but some of the artists who mastered it, had previously used film, such as Robakowski.

Artists and works

• Franciszka Themerson and Stefan Themerson. Przygoda czlowieka poczciwego (The Adventure of a Good Citizen, 1937) is a compendium of visual devices which shows what Stefan Themerson called his "urge to create visions," the title of his most influential essay. The war forced the Themersons to England where they continued to make films. The Eye and the Ear (1944-45) claims to visualise the ear's experience when it listens to a piece of music. However, since the music, Szymanowski's Slopiewnie, seeks to capture visual experiences in sound, the film only reverses the process, rendering the whole exercise rather pointless. The exception to this is the third movement, "Rowan Towers," in which a more mathematical system of interpreting the soundtrack is taken.
• Mieczyslaw Waskowski, Somnambulicy (Somnambulists, 1957), film attempts to recreate the principles of Tachist painting in cinema while the latter is a filming of a performance using Pawlowski's light box.
• Andrzej Pawlowski, Kineformy (Cineforms, 1957), box of mirrors and prisms produces unbelievably modern effects; wispy smoke, diaphanous curtains, passing ghosts and then suddenly solid organic forms.
• Walerian Borowczyk, Skola (School), comic animation about a soldier on parade reverses the invention of cinema by reducing the medium to a series of still photographs again. Dom (House, 1958) - made with Jan Lenica.
• Jan Lenica, Labirynt (Labyrinth, 1962), a film which looks back to the Max Ernst's collages for his book La Femme 100 tetes and forward to Terry Gilliam's animations for Monty Python's Flying Circus. It is a surreal nocturnal world of bowler hatted angels, walruses who try to fly and voluptuous young maidens who prefer not to be rescued from the clutches of Bosch-like dragons.
• Rynek (Market, 1970) by Jozef Robakowski, Tadeusz Junak and Ryszard Meissner has historical interest as an early example of the use of time-lapse photography.
• Robakowski, Ide (I am Going, 1973), a performance piece of the author climbing 200 steps of a look-out tower. The first part of his Vital-Video (1994), "My Videomasochism"; armed with a whole selection of everyday instruments, Robakowski attacks his face in a variety of ways; meanwhile, almost childish grunts, groans and cries play over the top in response to the self-inflicted prodding.
• 1970s-1980s, women artists: Zofia Kulik, Ewa Partum, Natalia LL, Anna Kutera, Katarzyna Hierowska, Jadwiga Singer, Jolanta Marcolla, Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Ewa Zarzycka, Barbara Konopka, Irena Nawrot, Iwona Lemke-Konart.
• Open Form (1971), carried out jointly by the students of Lodz Film School and the Department of Sculpture of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. [1]
• Natalia LL, Consumptive Art (1973), on one side an attempt to compromise the cognitive ambition of conceptual art, and on the other an effort to critically relate to the iconographic sphere of popular culture that frequently employs erotic motives. [2]
• Zofia Kulik
• Ewa Partum, visual poetry has been the main area of the artist’s creative interests since 1969, along with films contained in the structural cinema paradigm. Since the late seventies she has gradually moved from the issues of autonomous conceptual art and contemplation of purely artistic problems to taking up feminist issues. Tautological cinema (1973), film cycle. [3]
• Antosz & Andzia (Stanislaw Antosz and Katarzyna Hierowska), multi-element play on the reality of TV serials and Hollywood movies, Murderer (1975)
• Anna Kutera, closely linked with the artistic community of Wroclaw, where she co-created The Recent Art Gallery with Romuald Kutera and Lech Mrozek; in the mid-seventies these artists were augmenting the contextual art theses of Jan Lwidziski. Presentation (1974) [4]
• Zbigniew Rybczynski, Nowa ksiazka (A New Book, 1975) and Tango (1980). Both are amazing films in terms of the amount of planning and calculation that must have been made to get all the characters and their actions to dovetail. In Nowa ksiazka, the life of a Polish town is narrated through nine static camera angles shown simultaneously on a divided screen. Tango, the last film he made in Poland, is both a philosophical look at the solitary, mechanical nature of life and a genuinely funny piece at the same time. Starting with an empty room, Rybczynski one-by-one adds stereotyped figures from an extended family. All of them are unaware of the others and are caught in a loop of meaningless repetition to the rhythm of a simple tango. The films are also interesting in that they anticipate the techniques which video offers.
• Barbara Konopka, musician, Interferences (1985), depicts a number of self-manipulative interventions of the artist on her own body. Caprices and Variations on One's Own Subject, Opus 13, Part 1 (1994), a "reflection on the human destiny," mingles pictures of the Virgin Mary with octopus innards. The individual images are powerful, but somehow they fail to hang together.
• Miroslaw Rogala, makes video operas, Nature Is Leaving Us (1988), has the idealistic naiveti which afflicts most art about saving the environment.
• Jacek Szleszynski, Self-Portrait (1994), computer technology used maturely for visual effect.
• Michal Brzezinski, Memory (2003), Found Footage based on Temporary Internet Files folder. [5] Mnemosyne (2006), computer technology through the visual effect transforms unknown sculpture from Rome into half-abstract animated reality. [6] Modern Post Mortem Found Footage deconstruction of Vertov, Debord, and home archive of young citizens of very postcolonial city in Poland. Generative repetitions evocate socio-meditation on the subject of modernism in Central Europe (2008)

Articles

• Lukasz Ronduda: The Films of Polish Women Artists in the 1970s and 1980s - From the Archive of Polish Experimental Film. http://www.artmargins.com/content/cineview/ronduda.html
• Andrew J Horton, "Avant-garde Film and Video in Poland" Central European Review (November 1998) [7] (English)

Resources

• Archive of Polish experimental film, http://www.csw.art.pl/archfilm/

Computer and computer-aided art

• Jan Pamula
• Wojciech Bruszewski
• Zenon Kulpa

Video art

Background

• Video art is entirely incompatible with the utilitarian character of that institution (television), it is the artistic movement, which through its independence, denounces the mechanism of the manipulation of other people. Robakowski, 1976
• first video works in Poland, both tapes and installations, were made in 1973

Artists

• Jozef Robakowski
• 1970s: Workshop of Film Form
• Lodz-Kaliska Group
• 1980s: Izabella Gustowska, Zbigniew Libera, Jerzy Truszkowski
• late 1980s: Yach-Film group: Yach Paszkiewicz, Dorota Podlaska, Bombela Kuich, Andrzej Kuich, Andrzej Wasik. Worked on the border of film and video. Paszkiewicz was shooting on Super 8 film and transferring onto magnetic tape. In his case relationship between video and music was evident. His later career as a musical videoclip maker seems to be a consequence of the previously made artistic decisions.
• late 1980s: Krzysztof Skarbek. Brought into video art his previous film experiences, and connected video with musical performance and concert. The space of Skarbek's activities is the world of ritual, para-magical behaviours. Vital expression of his works is a vehhicle for his previous reflection on reality in its different aspects. The artist's commentary to his tape Nasz pr dki beton-Aront (Our Quick Concrete-Aront) from 1989 - a very important work for the development of the new video art in Poland - shows his position very clearly: "The action is laid in a 'New industrial Village'. People practising their rituals in masks and holy colours accept the severe unapproachable reality they live in. They try to accustom themselves to it by means of magic activities. The film reveals that what effects our senses in extremities i.e. Promethean Struggle, Rebellion, Heroism, Good Humour. CONCRETE structures-modules are like holy statues - ALTARS or the primitive Bush. Secular powers crash together love and prevalence here."
• 1990s: Jan Brzuszek, Barbara Konopka, Miroslaw Emil Koch, Maciej Walczak, Wojciech Zamiara
• late 1990s: Marek Wasilewski represents quite cool but in the same time very sensitive, and in many cases very humoures poetics. His interest in theoretical aspects of video art makes his art close (but in a very specific way) to analytic video. Piotr Wyrzykowski puts into focus the problem of the body with its various connotations, and in the same time he is very much occupied with the problems of interactivity. Anna Kuczynska and Katarzyna Radkowska introduce into the Polish video problems connected with gender and femininity. The Lyyying Community present deconstructive, aggressive, dadaist-like attitude towards problems of video form, communication and aesthetics. Jacek Szleszynski and Cezariusz Andrejczuk develop computer animation forms. Jan Koza makes specific folk-poetry-animation-video. The variety of genres and forms makes the Polish video art nowadays very rich and polymorphic.
• 2000s Many artists in Poland (like Zbigniew Libera) says in this time that video is dead. Michal Brzezinski is the only artist creating conceptual based art in digital video as his only medium. Following the formalistic and dialectic montage (S. Eisenstein), through the structural film (H. Frampton) [8] Brzezinski is trying to redefine video art as generative film (L. Manovich) [9] but with his traditional duration, and without usage of the networks, or the databases during the screening. Video as language of new media.

Events

• presentations of video art traditionally organised in galleries since the 1970s
• In 1989 the first edition of WRO - International Sound Basis Visual Art Festival was organised in Wroclaw (Piotr Krajewski, Violetta Krajewska, Zbigniew Kupisz). After three annual appearances the festival is working as biennial now.
• In the CCA, besides regular video presentations, an annual international festival of experimental cinema and video art is held.
• In 1994 the first video festival in Lublin took place
• In 2000's most part of video art events was organized by Michal Brzezinski [10]
• The Hidden Decade, retrospective of Polish video art 1985-1995, in National Musem Wroclaw, part of WRO Biennale in 2009

Education

• 1980s: academies of fine arts (Torun and Wroclaw)

Centres

• Polish Video Art Data Bank, *1988 in Lodz, founded by Ryszard Kluszczynski, a non-profit organisation for media culture
• In 1990 Kluszczynski founded Film & Video Department in The Centre for Contemporary Art - Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw.
• WRO Center for Media Art in Wroclaw, *1998

Articles and publications

• R. W. Kluszczynski, "Avant-garde Film and Video in Poland. An Historical Outline", in: The Middle Of Europe. The festival of avant-garde films and video from Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, ed. R. W. Kluszczynski, Warsaw 1991, p. 52-73
• R. W. Kluszczynski, "Video Art in Poland. An Historical Outline", in: Ostranenie. 1. International Video Festival at the Bauhaus Dessau, catalogue ed. by I. Arns and E. Tharandt, pp. 148-152.
• Ryszard Kluszczynski: "New Poland - New Video. Some reflections on Polish video art since 1989". In: translocation_new media/art. 1999. [11]
• Ryszard Kluszczynski, "AN OUTLINE HISTORY OF POLISH VIDEO ART" [12]
• Piotr Krajewski and Violetta Krajewska (eds.), From Monument to Market. Video Art and Public Space, Wroclaw: WRO Art Center, 2005 [13]
• Ryszard W. Kluszczynski and Anatoly V. Prokhorov, "VIDEO ART IN POLAND. AN HISTORICAL OUTLINE", [14]

Electroacoustic and experimental music, sound art

Composers

• Jozef Patkowski
• Wlodzimierz Kotonski
• Krzysztof Penderecki
• Boguslaw Schaeffer

Events

• Warsaw Autumn Festival initiated by Baird and Serocki presented since 1956 works by Berg, Schönberg, or Bartók; Stockhausen or Schaeffer visited. [15]

Electro-acoustic music studios and societies

• Polish Radio Experimental Studio Warszawa - SEPR, *1957 (director: Marek Zwyrzykowski)
• Electro-acoustic Music Studio at the Academy of Music in Krakow - SME, *1973 (director: Marek Choloniewski)
• Studio for Computer Music at the Academy of Music in Warsaw (coordinator: Krzysztof Czaja)
• Studio for Computer Composition at the Academy of Music in Wroclaw - SCC (director: Stanislaw Krupowicz)
• Studio for Computer Music at the Academy of Music in Poznan (director: Lidia Zielinska)
• Studio for Computer Music at the Academy of Music in Lodz (director: Krzysztof Knittel)
• Electroacoustic Music Studio at the Academy of Music in Katowice, *1992 (director: Jaroslaw Mamczarski)
• Studio for Computer Music at the Academy of Music in Gdansk (director: Krzysztof Olczak)
• Studio for Computer Music at the Academy of Music in Bydgoszcz (coordinator: Dobromila Jaskot)
• Studio for Computer Music at the Silesian University in Cieszyn (director: Krzysztof Gawlas)
• Polish Society for Electroacoustic Music, Krakow *2005

Articles

• Krzysztof Szlifirski, "Electroacoustic music in Poland. Brief history and present time situation". 1993. [16]

Media theory

• Ryszard Kluszczynski
• Piotr Piotrowski
• Lukasz Ronduda

more

• Edward Krasinski
• Henryk Stażewski, a member of many international groups before the war, not only remained influential, but continued his artistic career almost till the end of his long life (died in 1988)
• Katarzyna Kobro (died in early 1950s)
• Władysław Strzemiński (died in early 1950s)

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