Filmoteka Muzeum

Performance-for-camera by Waldemar Tatarczuk was carried out without audience in the public space of Lublin. The accompanying music was created live by Dariusz Fodczuk and Dariusz Gryczan, who were banging on a metal container with a stick and playing the trumpet.

The space of a rubbish bin shelter was filled with opaque bottles with yellow paint suspended from the roof, while the walls were covered with a schematic horizontal drawing of a human figure and an inscription with the performance title. Making a full circle, the artist smashed the bottles one after another, while the blows were supposed to evoke injuries inflicted on the drawn human figure. The walls of the bin shelter became gradually covered with yellow paint.

Tracing the eponymous way to the east, Tatarczuk went against the trajectory of the sun – symbolised by colour yellow – thus reversing its direction, as it were. He headed east, which stood for the place where everything begins. At the same time, he indicated that the way – the path of cognition and reaching the sources – may be difficult and painful.

The context of the time when the work was created – the final years of the communist rule in Poland – encourages interpretations related to the geopolitical meaning of east and west. Yet, the artist renounces such a perspective, situating his performance at a more profound level and shunning political meanings related to the conditions of the period prior to the collapse of communism. As Tatarczuk adds, the myth of apolitical art, characteristic of the 1970s, was still alive on the Lublin art scene at the time.

text on the basis of an interview with Waldemar Tatarczuk, February 2018

ŁM
 

Year: 1988
Duration: 4'35"
Language: no language
Source:

© Waldemar Tatarczuk