Polish Performance Archive

Description by Filmoteka Muzeum

 

Even those guests to Oskar Dawicki’s performance who arrived on time came across nothing more than an extended ending of the show, during which the artist bowed and thanked everyone for coming to the sound of applause from a tape recorder. Thus, Dawicki located at the heart of his action a celebration of the end, which was meant to unveil the basic void of the world of art after the conceptual turn of the 1960s and 1970s, which consisted in a radical rejection of its metaphysical grasp and “dissolving” art in reality. Doomed to mediation through “secularised” discourse, art has never managed to fill that void, but only to integrate it. However, Dawicki’s goal is also not to fill the empty space, but to stress its emptiness even more acutely. Proceeding according to Agamben’s logic of profanation, instead of looking for answers to essentialist questions, Dawicki emphatically manifests their void in an attempt to retrieve them as “pure means”.