Filmoteka Muzeum

Actors: Zdzisław Sosnowski, Halina Lenartowicz, Teresa Tyszkiewicz

In Goalkeeper, series of photographs and films created from 1974, Zdzisław Sosnowski concentrated on the analysis of the processes of creating (simulating) contemporary myths, promoting idols and their spectacular careers by the mass media. Towards this end, he unveiled the processes of creating meaning, representation and sense in the global network of the media.

The artist tapped into the potential of the advertising-propaganda discourse, with all its attractive features (dynamic editing, expressive acting and spectacular gadgets). He borrowed from mass culture the ready-made language of creating representations in the attempt at an ambiguous (Pop art) and allegoric (critical-cynical) over-identification with the mass media and industrial production of myths.

Heralding the collapse of avant-garde utopias and projects related to the autonomy of artistic language, Sosnowski adopted a post-conceptual stance of an artist who ascertained the marginalisation of art, given the increase in importance of popular culture and science. His artistic practice was aimed at undermining the world of art through the strategies of appropriation and the aesthetics of repetition.

In the political sphere, critical-cynical allegory of the series is reflected in the critical perspective on the process of “consumerisation” of socialism and the mechanisms of political myth cultivated by the media of communist Poland, with a simultaneous possibility of accepting it as a proposal for new official art. Yet it has to be said that Sosnowski’s project had a rather critical meaning.

References: David Crowley, Art of Consumption, [in:] 1,2,3... Avant-gardes. Film/Art Between Experiment and Archive, Ł. Ronduda, F. Zeyfang (eds.), Warsaw 2006; Ł. Ronduda, Polish Art of the 70s Avant-garde, Warsaw 2009; Zdzisław Sosnowski, Goalkeeper, 1977, unpublished, Archive of the Centre for Academic Information and Documentation, CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw.

(ŁM)