Difference between revisions of "Poland"

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===Constructivists===
 
===Constructivists===
 
Painters, sculptors, poets.<br>
 
Painters, sculptors, poets.<br>
[[Władysław Strzemiński]] (Warsaw/Lodz) [http://www.ddg.art.pl/strzeminski/], [[Katarzyna Kobro]] (Warsaw/Lodz) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katarzyna_Kobro], [[Mieczyslaw Szczuka]] (Warsaw), [[Henryk Stazewski]]
+
[[Władysław Strzemiński]] (Warsaw/Lodz) [http://www.ddg.art.pl/strzeminski/], [[Katarzyna Kobro]] (Warsaw/Lodz) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katarzyna_Kobro], [[Mieczyslaw Szczuka]] (Warsaw), [[Henryk Stazewski]], [[Karol Hiller]], [[Henryk Berlewi]]
 
; Groups
 
; Groups
 
* [[Blok]], Warsaw, 1923-1926
 
* [[Blok]], Warsaw, 1923-1926
 
* [[Praesens]], Warsaw, 1926-1930, avant-garde abstract art group, [http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praesens] [http://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/12755/ubc_2002-0162_fixed.pdf]
 
* [[Praesens]], Warsaw, 1926-1930, avant-garde abstract art group, [http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praesens] [http://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/12755/ubc_2002-0162_fixed.pdf]
* [[a.r.]], Lodz, 1929-1936. In 1931 founded Europe’s first museum of modern art, Art Museum in Lodz.
+
* [[a.r.]], Lodz, 1929-1936. In 1931 founded Europe’s first museum of modern art, Museum Sztuki in Lodz.
 +
; Events
 +
* Constructivism in Poland 1923-1936, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976. [http://www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/5347/releases/MOMA_1976_0006_6.pdf]
 
; Writings
 
; Writings
 
* [[Tadeusz Peiper]], "Metropolis. Mass. Machine." ("Miasto. Masa. Maszyna."), manifesto  
 
* [[Tadeusz Peiper]], "Metropolis. Mass. Machine." ("Miasto. Masa. Maszyna."), manifesto  

Revision as of 14:33, 22 August 2011

Cities

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

Predecessors

Futurists

"Polish futurism was short-lived, drawing to a close in 1922. Bruno Jasieński became a stanch Communist, producing the poem Song on Jakub Szela (Słowo o Jakubie Szeli) and the novel I Burn Paris (Palę Pary ). His political activities led to his emigration to Soviet Russia, where after enjoying a stunning career for a few years he was arrested in 1937 and was killed as a traitor in the Stalinist purges. Another Communist-leaning author was Aleksander Wat – imprisoned in Russia during WWII, he would die in Paris in 1967 as a respected poet and the author of works including his final-tally memoirs My Century (Mój wiek) and anti-Soviet sketches. Anatol Stern became associated with film. Two artistic disciplines, poetry and painting, were practiced within the futurist movement by Stanisław Młodo eniec and by the long under-appreciated formist painter Tytus Czyzewski (the same combination of disciplines was similarly practiced by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and later by Bruno Schulz). Czyzewski introduced the principles of formism, drawn from painting, into his poetry: he gave his poems “formist” graphical layouts, and linked the two disciplines thematically. For example, the metaphors in his poem “sun in metamorphosis” (”słońce w metamorfozie”) seem close to the concept behind his painting “Nude with a Cat” (”Akt z kotem”). The painter Henryk Berlewi (who spent most of his life in France) engaged in joint artistic, advertising, and publishing ventures with the Warsaw group in the 1920s. They initiated an artistic phenomenon that was later continued by avant-garde groups throughout the interwar years, one which is highly interesting but has yet to be sufficiently studied: the relations between poetry and the fine arts, marked by bonds of friendship and cooperation that extended across Poland’s borders." [1]

Constructivists

Painters, sculptors, poets.
Władysław Strzemiński (Warsaw/Lodz) [2], Katarzyna Kobro (Warsaw/Lodz) [3], Mieczyslaw Szczuka (Warsaw), Henryk Stazewski, Karol Hiller, Henryk Berlewi

Groups
  • Blok, Warsaw, 1923-1926
  • Praesens, Warsaw, 1926-1930, avant-garde abstract art group, [4] [5]
  • a.r., Lodz, 1929-1936. In 1931 founded Europe’s first museum of modern art, Museum Sztuki in Lodz.
Events
  • Constructivism in Poland 1923-1936, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976. [6]
Writings
  • Tadeusz Peiper, "Metropolis. Mass. Machine." ("Miasto. Masa. Maszyna."), manifesto
  • Julian Przyboś, "Notre Dame" (”Who conceived of this abyss and cast it upward” – “Kto pomyślił tę przepaść i odrzucił ją w górę”)
  • Dźwignia, Warsaw, 1927, journal inspired by Soviet Lef edited by Mieczyslaw Szczuka
  • L'Art contemporain, a periodical published in Paris by Jan Brzękowski

Literature

  • Irena Kossowska, "MIĘDZY TRADYCJĄ I AWANGARDĄ. POLSKA SZTUKA LAT 1920 I 1930", 2004. (Polish) [7]
  • Alina Kowalczykowa, "The Interwar Years – 1918-1939", [8]

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.
  • Aleksander Ford (1908–1980), member of Start (1929-1935). [9] [10]
  • Wanda Jakubowska (1907–1998), member of Start (1929-1935).
  • Stanisĺaw Wohl (1912–1985), member of Start (1929-1935).
  • Jerzy Toeplitz (1909–1995), member of Start (1929-1935).
  • 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. [11]
  • 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. [12]
  • 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. [13]
  • 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) [14]
  • 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. [15] Mnemosyne (2006), computer technology through the visual effect transforms unknown sculpture from Rome into half-abstract animated reality. [16] 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)
Workshops
  • Start (Society of the Devotees of the Artistic Film; Stowarzyszenia Miłośników Filmu Artystycznego), 1929?-1935. Ford, Jakubowska, Wohl, Toeplitz.
  • SAF (Spółdzielnią Autorów Filmowych), *1935 by Franciszka and Stefan Themerson, one of the first film co-operatives
  • Polish Film Unit, under the aegis of Polish Ministry of Information & Documentation in London. Franciszka and Stefan Themerson worked there during 1942-54. Eugeniusz Cękalski, its first director, had been a member of SAF, as had Aleksander Ford, who also directed films for the Unit, 1943-44. No history of the Unit exists but ten films are preserved in the Imperial War Museum, London, and there were more. [17]
Venues
  • 1930s: film clubs in Warsaw (Start), Krakow, Lwow, Lodz
Events
  • late 1930s: first screenings of the European avant-garde in Warsaw (Len Lye, Basil Wright, Moholy-Nagy, Rene Clair, Leger, Chomette, Lacombe, Gilson), arranged by Franciszka and Stefan Themerson
Literature
  • fa (art film), journal of SAF co-operative, edited by Franciszka and Stefan Themerson
  • Lukasz Ronduda (eds.), 1,2,3 -- avant-gardes : film, art between experiment and archive, Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw ; Berlin ; New York : Sternberg, 2007.
  • 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) [18] (English)
Resources

Interactive environments and installations

Computer and computer-aided art

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 [1]
  • first video works in Poland, both tapes and installations, were made in 1973
Artists
Video installations
  • first half of 1970s: Bruszewski, Kwiek, Mikolajczyk, Wasko, Robakowski.
  • second half of 1970s, 1980s: Bruszewski, Paruzel, Rogala, Zgraja.
  • 1990s: Rogala, Konopka, Wasilewski.
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 [21]
  • The Hidden Decade, retrospective of Polish video art 1985-1995, in National Musem Wroclaw, part of WRO Biennale in 2009
  • "Analogue: Pioneering Artists' Video from Poland (1968–88)", Tate London, 60 min programme, selected by Lukasz Ronduda, [22]
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. [23]
  • Ryszard Kluszczynski: "New Poland - New Video. Some reflections on Polish video art since 1989". In: translocation_new media/art. 1999. [24]
  • Ryszard Kluszczynski, "AN OUTLINE HISTORY OF POLISH VIDEO ART" [25]
  • Piotr Krajewski and Violetta Krajewska (eds.), From Monument to Market. Video Art and Public Space, Wroclaw: WRO Art Center, 2005 [26]
  • Ryszard W. Kluszczynski and Anatoly V. Prokhorov, "VIDEO ART IN POLAND. AN HISTORICAL OUTLINE", [27]

Electroacoustic and experimental music, sound art

Composers
Performers
Events
  • Warsaw Autumn Festival initiated by Baird and Serocki presented since 1956 works by Berg, Schönberg, or Bartók; Stockhausen or Schaeffer visited. [40]
  • Musica Electronica Nova, Wroclaw 2011
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
Media
  • Exploratory Music from Poland, 2-CD, 2010. Produced by Adam Mickiewicz Institute and AudioTong.net as a part of Polska!Year and given away to the subscribers of The Wire magazine. [42]

Media theory

Literature

  • Lukasz Ronduda, Strategie subwersywne w sztukach medialnych, Krakow: Rabid, 2006 (Polish) [43]

more


Countries
avant-garde, modernism, experimental art, media culture, social practice

Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Central and Eastern Europe, Chile, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kosova, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, Morocco, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Slovenia, Slovakia, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States

  1. J. Robakowski, Video art - szansa podejscia rzeczywistosci, [in:] idem, Wypisy ze sztuki, Lublin 1978, p. 28