ZBIGNIEW WARPECHOWSKI – THE HAND, 1981 (1-10/10)
Dziekanka Workshop, Warsaw 1981
The Hand in Dziekanka was the ending of several day talks, mainly with the students of the Academy of Fine Arts, and its process was not very different from the plein-air performance.
Plein-air in Świeszyno near Miastko, 1980:
This was a performance for one hand. To highlight, make this fact visible, I have painted this hand (usually the left one) in black and yellow transversal stripes. The set of colors was the same as on road equipment, visible from the distance, distinct from everything. The items taken in hand are using this hand, meaning that it is not the hand that decide what the item has to do, but the vice versa. If I take a bird feather in my hand, thus feather has flied with a bird, so the hand has to fly with the feather, and whole me with teh hand. In this case and all other cases used for this performance, it was always the same as with this feathe. A thing, an item has its own feature, ownership, function and moreover, it has a proper „skill”, and I subordinate to this skill (…).
(Zbigniew Warpechowski, THE CONTAINER. An author’s description of thirty years of a life path through the art of performance. Gdańsk 1998)
