Aleksandra Ściegienna, Association of Art Historians Survey Visual Artists 1984-86
Aleksandra Ściegienna
Association of Art Historians Survey “Visual Artists 1984-86”
The survey “Visual Artists 1984-86”, organized by the Association of Art Historians (SHS), was financed from the Fund for Study of National Culture of the 19th and 20th Century[1], operated by the University of Wrocław. The survey began in 1985 and was carried out by a team made up of Marek Beylin, Wojciech Cesarski, Nawojka Cieślińska, Marcin Giżycki, Jarosław Krawczyk, Ewa Mikina, Bożena Stokłosa.
The survey was conceived as a record of changes in the art community at the turn of the 1980s, covering artists of different generations and groups. 77 interviews have survived. Probably not many more were completed, though the survey was to include around 220 interviews.
In addition to the obvious political context, the project followed the liquidation of the Association of Polish Artists and Designers (ZPAP) and the art journals Projekt and Sztuka, whose editors and critics were part of the team co-ordinating the interviews. Wiesława Wierzchowska’s collection of interviews with art critics, published by an underground press in 1989 as “Sąd nieocenzurowany” [2], provides valuable background for the survey. Both sources are mutually complementary and present very similar issues.
I have reviewed the SHS survey in the light of Paul Thompson’s commentary on interpretation of interviews published in his book “The Voice of the Past. Oral History”[3]. Thompson presents oral history as a historical research method and emphasises the importance of information about the lives of individuals as a vehicle of historical experience. Looking for evidence of a problem in a series of interviews and analysing them from different angles, one can put conclusions in a broader context. Interviews can also help to understand the structure of the context.
One should also remember that interviews are often much more than a story of the teller; they are the product of interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee. An interview should be interpreted as a joint effort of two individuals, a form of discourse shaped and structured by asking and replying to questions. Thompson stresses the need to analyse both questions and answers when interpreting an interview.
The project involved nearly the entire community of art critics and historians. Interviews were conducted by, among others, Waldemar Baraniewski, Krystyna Czerni, Tomasz Gryglewicz, Ewa Hronowska, Jaromir Jedliński, Jarosław Krawczyk, Anna Król, Ewa Mikina, Maria Morzuch, Anda Rottenberg, Maryla Sitkowska, Wojciech Skrodzki, Joanna Sosnowska, Paweł Sosnowski, Bożena Stokłosa, Piotr Szubert, Jan Trzupek, Anna Zacharska, Rafał Zakrzewski, Elżbieta Zawistowska, and Ryszard Ziarkiewicz.
The questionnaire contained 38 questions phrased by Bożena Stokłosa and Ewa Mikinia and divided into two groups. According to the organisers, the first group of questions concerned the interviewed artists’ opinions and evaluations of their own work, its origin, development, distinctive features, chronology, membership of a direction, school, generation: in other words, self-definition.
Another purpose of this group of questions was to gauge the artists’ knowledge of Polish post-war and contemporary art, its main concepts and problems such as tradition, the avant garde, “Polishness”, “international” circulation, history of the art, and criticism.
The other group of questions concerned the artists’ attitudes toward the implications of the political transformation of the early 1980s for art and art institutions: the scope and profile of information about art, the functions of museums and galleries, art in the era of Solidarity, the functions of sponsorship, the issue of ZPAP, creative freedom, and alternative art.
The questions were very extensive. The questionnaire was more like a script for an in-depth interview than a list of closed-ended questions. Each interviewer was expected to deliver the tapes (which were probably destroyed) and an edited transcript of the interview (3-4 copies), as well as a commentary describing the conditions of the interview, the atmosphere, the artist’s behaviour, and the way that the interview transcript was edited[4].
The interviews were not signed with the name of the artist or the interviewer but they were numbered. Each interview was reviewed. The reviewers evaluated the interviewers’ objectivity and consistency with the questionnaire and instructions, which specified the context of questions and suggested possible answers.
The instructions required the interviewers to keep their reactions to any opinions expressed by the artists in check, to keep a distance throughout the interview if the interviewer’s own opinions differed from those of the interviewee, and to refrain from arguing with the artist.
The extensive questions in the survey, the way they were phrased, and the very interesting instructions, which elaborated on the issues to be discussed and anticipated answers to many questions, suggest how art critics and historians perceived the art community in the mid-1980s and how they perceived themselves. Many of the questions and comments to the questions seem to be far from objective as they suggest specific answers. It is also interesting to see how many questions were asked on specific topics and themes.
An analysis of interviews, according to the list of questions and instructions divided into groups in the order they were given, indicates several issues and problems on which the survey focused. The first part focused on the artists’ own work while the second part focused on the specificity of art and the lives of artists in the decade.
I.
The first four questions concern the artist’s reflections about his or her own work. The purpose is to present the artist’s oeuvre, the latest works, and to identify the turning points in the artist’s biography. While the artists’ responses often referred to private experience, the instructions requested the interviewers “to ascertain how the artist’s work and consciousness were impacted by political and social break-throughs in the history of Poland after 1945, up to August 1980 and December 1981.” Such evaluation of the events of the early 1980s and their impact on the artists’ work and attitudes is more or less explicitly suggested in several questions of the survey. However, the artists referred to such issues only when asked directly about the relevance of political developments.
Further on, the survey contains questions which I believe were meant to introduce the subject of “engaged art.” The first issue is that of being contemporary and making contemporary art. While these concepts are defined in very general terms in the instructions (being contemporary as being in the present), the question is whether being contemporary here still retains the meaning which Piotr Juszkiewicz attributed to critics and artists during the Khrushchev Thaw. In his book “Od rozkoszy historiozofii do ‘Gry w nic‘”, Juszkiewicz argued that contemporary art “was [then] understood as various concepts of improving social realism or, later, as ‘hot’ abstraction [5]. For many artists, being contemporary meant to relate to current trends in Western art, understood as modern “catching up” with the trends. Only some artists of the younger generation, including Marek Sobczyk and Leon Tarasewicz, described being contemporary simply as a subjective experience of everything around us here and now. Generational differences in the understanding of problems and events emerge in several points of the survey but seem rather nuanced.
The next questions (Q7 and Q8) were control and follow-up questions for the preceding ones and referred to the connection between works of art and the time and place of their creation, as well as tradition, both tradition deserving continuation and tradition to be challenged. The commentary in the instructions clarified: “Find out whether the artist believes that he or she is a passive observer of reality or, conversely, its active participant who can influence reality through art, shape it, set an example for others’ attitudes to the times they live in […] It would be interesting to determine which motifs and values of the Polish cultural tradition the artist considers to be particularly important and deserving of elaboration in art”. The authors of the survey wanted not so much to encourage a discussion about conditions as one about modes of behaviour. Such deliberations naturally led directly to question 9: “How do you understand ‘engaged art’, what art practice do you relate it to?”
As the authors of the questions suggested: “It is important to determine whether the artist is: strongly negative about engaged art because it is associated with opportunism or administrative requirements to raise social and political issues, as in social realism; ambivalent because the artist relates engaged art to both the foregoing and its opposite, i.e., raising specific issues, in particular political and social issues, against all censorship; or strongly positive because the artist understands engagement as limited to the latter, or largely expands it to include a range of problems in contemporary reality”.
Some answers were emotional. Engaged art was usually equated with social realism or prompted reactions to the effect that “there is no art that would not be engaged”; some artists talked about being “engaged in art”. A clear distinction was made between “I the artist” and “I the citizen”, both roles being seen as mutually exclusive or juxtaposed.
Jacek Sienicki: “For me, this term is inadequate. Art is always engaged; otherwise, it is not art […] It often happens that what artists took very seriously is long gone while what they thought was fun has survived and really matters”.
Jacek Sempoliński: “[…] general engagement in seeking the truth, the mystery, ultimate things. It’s not true that artists who do that are not engaged, that they are tepid, live in an ivory tower. They are searching for general issues with total commitment and dedication. I consider myself to be one of them, to be engaged in a quest for ultimate things”.
Oskar Hansen: “How I understand engaged art is that you do your work true to what you believe in, not as a careerist who works by order against your own beliefs”.
Andrzej Dłużniewski: “Art has so many of its own functions that it does not need any additional obligations. When art takes on such obligations, it impairs art. However, art as art has to be engaged”.
Tomasz Ciecierski: “I think that the very term engaged art sounds awful in the Polish context. For me, engaged art has always been engaged in socialist reality and its apotheosis […] However, I think that all art is simply engaged, it is engaged in art, in reality, in all that is. In this context, I am an engaged artist”.
Jacek Kryszkowski: “For me, engagement has a negative implication because it means that the concept is imposed on someone who is good, who is on a quest. Engagement offered as a practice necessary to create a socially useful individual was for me doubtful and smacked of propaganda. The word carries a propaganda intention, it is a concept coined by propaganda and journalism. It is void of meaning”.
Jarosław Modzelewski: “My first reaction to this term is negative. This kind of art could do very stupid things. And yet strange, unique things could be made at the same time […] I myself have never been engaged head first. I am no activist”.
Marek Sobczyk: “Engaged art that I know, which corresponds well to that term, is the art of people engaged in a struggle, who are adamant. Sometimes it has its background in the Catholic Church, sometimes in the opposition movement, but generally it’s this type of art. But I think that engaged art can be made by normal people, without deviations, without a broken backbone. And then such art would have to be different, possibly not achievable in Poland, where, as a matter of fact, you can only get engaged in some bitter deliberations which give rise to a hope that is barely there”.
Similar statements appear in Wiesława Wierzchowska’s interviews with critics. What seems to be of greatest import is the autonomy of art because, as Andrzej Osęka argues: “Art which talks about the misfortunes inflicted upon us by socialism sooner or later becomes journalism”[6]. Social and political developments of the 1980s are also seen as “inexpressible”. Alicja Kępińska argues: “Current events, however important they are, like what we have gone through, do not immediately enter the bloodstream of the arts” as some things “cannot be expressed with a sign. The sign remains inadequate to the depth of the drama”[7].
Barbara Majewska points to the complexity of the problem: “The written history of Polish art assumes that there was a breakthrough from social realism to modernity. For me, it was a breakthrough from a lie to a truth of the artist; those who easily equated the truth of the artist with directions in art brought in from the world often lost sight of important values, which others considered more significant than catching up with one trend or another”[8].
In some interviews, critics like Zbigniew Makarewicz stress that the autonomy of art was dependent not on the attitude of the artist interested in purely artistic values, but on the existing situation produced by the government’s policy of winning over the art community. Due to that policy, art was made in a context bearing the brand of social realism.
Zbigniew Makarewicz: “[…] But we still live in an era when Polish criticism after 1956 has remained a legacy of social realism. Stalin is dead but Stalinists live on. I don’t believe that anyone engaged in the doctrine of social realism could wake up one day as a competent avant-garde critic”.
Wiesława Wierzchowska: “People change their opinions not just for opportunist reasons […]”
Zbigniew Makarewicz: “Well, I’m not thinking about people in general but about specific individuals. Stalinists live on, they have changed their aesthetic preferences. They were the ones who decided about the art movement, the education of artists and critics, the university curricula. Having broken up with the tradition of Polish criticism, subtle art criticism which had existed here after all, those people must have had huge problems with the interpretation of art developments after 1956. Their texts are a testimony to that. These texts reveal a subconscious compulsion inherent in the critic’s psyche to attribute some kind of statement to an abstract painting”[9].
The issue of engagement was followed up in the next question (Q10) concerning non-conformism. The authors of the survey wanted to “determine to what extent an understanding of artistic independence, just like an understanding of engagement, is tied up with the experience of post-war Polish art: for instance, do artists consider these two attitudes to be antinomies; do they reserve the notion of independence for the area of unrestrained search for form and technique; do they equate it with a rejection of all pressure and influence regarding the quest for content and expression; do they associate this concept with the avant garde”. Non-conformism is declared in the interviews in an apolitical context. On the other hand, in the opinion of many interviewees, if all art is engaged, then non-conformism is impossible. An artist who is “engaged in art” comes into contact with people through exhibitions and other activity, and thus cannot remain completely independent.
The next question (Q11) asks about the rationale of identifying a distinct art practice. While the authors of the survey wanted to understand the attitude of artists to “gigs” – well-paid propaganda or advertising jobs, work for sale, work by commission, etc., most interviewees talked about ethics in abstract terms, detached from specific situations. The reduction of ethics to professional practice is a clear allusion to the boycott.
Maciej Szańkowski: “Ethics is a fundamental point. Art must be ethical. If an artist is not ethical, it’s no art at all. Ethics in art means to be true to oneself and one’s beliefs. Other than that, you’re unethical”.
Typically, all things political are understood as reserved for the State; hence, what is political is seen as unethical.
Responses to the question about contacts with world art (Q14) never referred to Eastern Europe. Not a single interviewee talked about art in Hungary, the Czech Republic or the USSR. In this context, it is interesting to note the commentary to the question in which the authors of the survey also refer exclusively to Western art: “Determine whether the artist has an inferiority complex as a Polish artist; whether the artist attributes the complex to all post-war Polish art with respect to West European and American art; and where the complex comes from”. Interviews published in “Sąd nieocenzurowany” reveal a similar problem among art critics. There is a clear inferiority complex and a fascination with the West; even if travel in Eastern Europe is mentioned, the interviewees never talk about art in the visited countries.
What is also striking is an ahistorical understanding of the concept of the avant garde (Q16), reiterated in almost all interviews. Quite often, the avant garde is understood stereotypically as innovativeness and inventiveness.
Grzegorz Kowalski: “In the colloquial sense, the avant garde is a propensity to keep looking. I identify with such propensity […] It is tantamount to some degree of artistic freedom. It is an achievement of the avant garde to try and be free."
Maciej Szańkowski: “I think that the problem of the avant garde did exist: avant-garde artists versus those in the rear […] I had a seminal experience once: I was taking part in an art workshop in Bochum, preparing an installation to be placed in a local housing estate. I established very close relations with the locals. The installation was first ‘tried out’ and discussed. There was a public debate one night at the local swimming pool, in front of which my installation was to be placed. Someone asked: ‘What if the local community does not accept your installation?’ I didn’t know how to answer a question I had never been asked before. Where I come from, no-one needs to be asked, you just put your thing in place. The question made me think. The installation was put in place and I think that the locals liked it, it was welcomed. But I was stunned. I realised that I was in another country with completely different rules, where people can say no. It did impact my general understanding of things”.
Zbigniew Warpechowski: “What I understand as the classic notion of the avant garde has always come in response to the slogans of ideologues and revolutionaries. The belief in science and progress was based on forward movement, but what was believed to be forward was not always so. There was a backlash and then the avant garde turned back. Some people in Poland have recently prophesised the ‘end’ or ‘death’ of the avant garde. As a notion, not a dogma or taboo, the avant garde exists and will continue to exist in every society”.
Jarosław Modzelewski: “For me, it is simply a kind of pioneering. I never thought about art in terms of progression or a quest in a specific direction. Consequently, I reject the idea of ever being part of the avant garde or anything like it. I don’t think much of it. It doesn’t matter to me what is currently believed to be the avant garde, but it doesn’t mean I underestimate it”.
Marek Sobczyk: “The concept of the avant garde is meaningful but not specific. It certainly means those people who advance, understand a little more, but it makes no reference to the art movement and its advocates: critics and promoters”.
Jarosław Kozłowski: “In the early 1970s, there was a lot of talk about the avant garde, and I even had the aspiration to be part of the avant garde. This related to the then current belief in progress in art, a group of leaders who are ahead of all others, while those others are ‘catching up.’ A continuous extension of the domain of the arts, something new emerging. For long now, however, this kind of thinking has been out of date. I don’t think that the development of art identified with progress can be really relevant”.
Wiesław Borowski’s article “Pseudoawangarda”, published in Warsaw-based Kultura in 1975, was often referred to in the context of the question about the avant garde and in connection with a discussion of the alternative movement (question 26 in the second part of the questionnaire). Borowski ascribed to the avant garde the tendency to make works of art autonomous and thus denied it any connection with the reality. Thus, Borowski reduced the concept of the avant garde to a definition similar to that used by the artists interviewed in the SHS survey.
II.
The second part of the survey, concerning the specificity of the 1980s, opened with questions about art criticism, its current status, its role in providing information about the current art production and selecting the production to identify the most valuable works of art (Q18-Q20). There was a question about the art journals „Projekt” and „Sztuka” (Q20).
Most of the answers presented a picture of the critic as a friend and companion engaged in works of art to mediate their reception and understanding: the critic as an archivist and advocate of an art collective or a direction of art. Many interviewees were sceptical about critics with their own agendas.
Many interviews, both in the survey and in Wiesława Wierzchowska’s book, reiterate the issue of art criticism at its best at the time of the Khrushchev Thaw. In hindsight, Przegląd Artystyczny led by Aleksander Wojciechowski and the visual arts section of Współczesność edited by Jerzy Stajuda were strongly mythicized. „Sąd nieocenzurowany” quotes „Report on the State of the Art of Art Criticism and Art Institutions” [Raport o stanie krytyki i instytucji artystycznej] by Janusz Bogucki, Wiesław Borowski and Andrzej Turowski[10]. There was a palpable resistance to contemporary criticism of whatever origin. While the authors of the survey were very interested in the artists’ opinions of the art journals Projekt and Sztuka, these turned out to be hardly ever read.
Jarosław Kozłowski: „The current situation is hopeless. Take the reports on global artistic events in Biuletyn Sztuki Polskiej and Sztuka. I don’t know who edits them, but both are embarrassingly bad.”
Jerzy Stajuda (artist and art critic): “All prominent art critics use pre-Gutenberg means of communication. It has its advantages, but it’s difficult to evaluate the current role of criticism. Its social role seems to be negligible. Apart from Tygodnik Powszechny, which is too generous anyway, and a handful of other papers, which are hard to come by, the press offers nothing intelligent or trustworthy. Sometimes it looks like things are going to get better, but then it all ends with amateur bullshit. The press celebrated a year-long festival of an artist named Duda-Gracz but nobody noticed; we have all gone to the dogs”.
The next questions concerned the social perception of art (Q21 – Q23). The authors of the survey were interested in what kind of social groups the artists believed their audience belonged to; what the artists thought of the audience from the ranks of the workers, the intelligentsia, the art criticism “ghetto”; and whether the artists’ opinions of those groups and their preferences evolved over the past years, especially after August 1980 and December 1981.
The artists often talked about their work as if it began and ended in the studio; they emphasised sensuality, intimacy, subjectivity, the creative process. Hence, the resulting image of the audience as an exclusive group of the “cognoscenti” and friends, and the need for a specific closed institution like the author’s own gallery, an extension of the studio, typical of Poland. Works of art may have a public life, but only within elite circles.
Jarosław Modzelewski: “The social reception of art is catastrophic. Horrible. It sounds dangerous, but it’s true despite art events which engage a bigger public […] If the situation wasn’t rosy before, it’s tragic now”.
Leon Tarasewicz: “If there is any reception of art in Poland now, then only in big cities and within very narrow circles. There is a need for art ‘in the cassock,’ as I call it, for ideological art moving in a specific direction in a very narrow circle, and of course for official art, publicised and promoted, which is received by very few people in cities, but by everyone in the provinces: they watch television and see what art is”.
There is no mention of the museum as a venue sparking discussions, collecting archives and documents, organising exhibitions abroad, selecting works and running competitions. It is an independent gallery, or the artist’s own gallery (Q23), such as EL (Elbląg), Mona Lisa (Wrocław), Współczesna, Foksal, Remont, Repassage, Dziekanka (Warsaw), Akumulatory (Poznań), Strych (Łódź), that is considered to be an organiser and publisher. Although many such galleries were closely linked to State institutions, they were perceived as independent.
The next questions of the survey (Q24 – Q29) concerned State and Church sponsorship, the alternative movement, the boycott, and the impact of August 1980 and martial law on art.
Only some interviewees identified and interpreted different art strategies of the State in different periods after 1945. The authors of the survey wanted to understand artists’ attitudes to the typical forms of “cultural policy”: their opinions of State support, ZPAP, Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych as an administrator of exhibitions, Pracownia Sztuk Plastycznych and the “gigs” it offered. On the other hand, the goal was to understand the scope of Church support and the alternative movement during the boycott. The instructions stressed: “It would be interesting to see whether the artist considers participation in art practices organised by the Church and the alternative movement as part of the boycott of exhibitions and other events supported by the State, and whether the artist was of that opinion after December 1981”.
All interviewees thought little of the support of the Church. Most artists had had some experience with exhibitions in churches, censored by local parish priests; they had seen the exultation of national liberation and the lack of real interest in art. Younger artists plainly rejected such collaboration. Interviewees of the older generation seemed disappointed with the failure of building a common platform of understanding with the Church.
Tadeusz Brzozowski: “I did not take part in official exhibitions. I am closely affiliated with the former association of artists, I was a member back in 1945. This is something you do not forget […] I personally take part in church exhibitions; not all, only those I agree with. I think we need some kind of normalisation, but gradually, not all at once, without giving orders all over again”.
Marek Sapetto: “The boycott was not initiated after 13 December, it started once the association was liquidated. I don’t call it a boycott, it’s simply a withdrawal. In February 1982, we were to have a big exhibition at Zachęta and we withdrew from it because we thought that emotions were not good for looking at our pictures. The boycott started when we found out that we were opposed, when they started to offend us”.
Andrzej Dłużniewski: “I was never in favour of the boycott. I must stress this because I was often criticised for my opinions by friends and others. This does not mean that I was active back then. I just didn’t feel like it, the emotional climate was bad. It was a terrible time, but I think the boycott itself was idiotic […] Boycotting whom? The government? Was art ever made for the government? Maybe some people made paintings for the government. I never did anything for the government, so I had no reason to turn my back on the government. I always had my back turned on the government […] I could never understand it. Especially when many people I didn’t trust took part in exhibitions in churches”.
Stefan Gierowski: “I had a very unpopular opinion of the boycott. In general, I approved of the boycott in principle: it was an understandable, natural reaction to martial law; but I also thought that the boycott could create an abnormal situation and from this perspective I was against the boycott. Was I afraid of it? Of a situation known from neighbouring countries, where there are apparently modern artists, rebels opposing the dominant cultural policy, but it’s artistically all very weak and, most importantly, made for non-artistic reasons”.
Jerzy Onuch: “For me, the boycott was simple as I had never taken part in official association exhibitions at Zapiecek or BWA. Mroczek was different, he was never boycotted … Everyone has an individual reaction. Now I wouldn’t accept an exhibition at Zachęta or the Association”.
The survey closes with a series of questions about the Association of Polish Artists and Designers (ZPAP) (Q30 – Q 35). The instructions read: “It is important to determine the opinion of the artists about the new associations from the perspective of political instrumentalisation; to what extent do non-members consider membership a sign of materialist opportunism; how polarised are opinions about moral and political aspects of ZPAP in the last few years depending on membership or non-membership of the new associations”.
The interviewees had negative opinions of ZPAP as a monopolist and a part of the system, accepted due to the practical resources of the institution. On the other hand, it was positively assessed for its surprisingly independent decision to support the 1980 strikes.
Many interviewees commenting on ZPAP stressed the importance of an organisation or trade union which could “satisfy social needs concerning supplies or benefits”. All interviewees were negative about the new associations and considered their formation a purely political move.
Jarosław Modzelewski: “I think that if the Association existed under proper conditions with specific means, it could satisfy the needs of its members. Most of all, social needs concerning supplies or benefits. However, any potential further activities should respond to the needs of the members depending on their initiative in order to avoid automatic mechanisms. Apart from supplies and benefits, the association should offer options but never impose anything”.
The final questions (Q36 – Q38) concerned the risks and limitations of artistic freedom and the financial situation of the artist. Most interviewees shied away from giving an answer, cautiously circumvented the issue and quoted very general risks. The risks or limitations included “yielding to one’s own weaknesses”, “materialism”, “commercial art”. Surprisingly, there was no mention of State financing, the policy of “winning the art community”, control over galleries and institutions, control of information, censorship, or simply the political situation[11]. In this context, some statements referred to the advantages of a socialist system without a market economy, where the artist does not have to make commercial art. Such opinions were expressed both by interviewed artists and art critics.
Maciej Szańkowski: “In the capitalist system, the artist is more commercialised and dependent on galleries, but has opportunities artists here do not have. Here, you simply can’t do much unless you shut yourself in your studio, like I do, and do your thing just for yourself. There, artists who depend on art dealers can get lost for good. But some artists find their way in the system and get great opportunities to make independent art, which we don’t have here. We don’t have that because we live in a poor country where the conditions for achieving our aspirations are very limited”.
Jarosław Modzelewski: “Besides, there are very destructive factors also in other parts of the world. It’s a race and a struggle so intense that no-one can control it. When I sometimes browse through catalogues brought from the West, I get really depressed. I can see a huge effort of hundreds of artists who sacrifice themselves to do what they can. All in all, paradoxically, our situation is pretty comfortable. There is a black-out, the mood is calm, you can watch things and never get the feeling that everyone is running on but you’re running too slow”.
This is only an outline of the survey structure and an enumeration of several statements recorded during interviews with artists. Analysing interviews question by question is a generalisation necessary to summarise the project and keep clear the structure of the survey. In fact, the questions of the survey are interrelated and the artists’ answers create many additional references.
Aleksandra Ściegienna graduate in art history from Warsaw University. Works at the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw.
Notes
1. Some documents refer to the title “Polish National Culture, Development Trends and Perception.” ↑
2. Wiesława Wierzchowska, “Sąd nieocenzurowany”, (Łódź 1989). ↑
3. Paul Thompson, “The Voice of the Past. Oral History”, (Oxford 2000). ↑
4. Interviewers were also requested to prepare a summary containing basic information including the artist’s biography, list of exhibitions, bibliography, and membership of social and political organisations. ↑
5. Piotr Juszkiewicz, “Od rozkoszy historiozofii do ‘Gry w nic’. Polska krytyka artystyczna czasu odwilży”, Poznań 2005, p. 259. ↑
6. Wiesława Wierzchowska, op. cit., p. 148. ↑
7. Ibidem, pp. 86-87. ↑
8. Ibidem, pp. 93-94. ↑
9. Ibidem, p.113. ↑
10. Janusz Bogucki, Wiesław Borowski, Andrzej Turowski, Sztuka i krytyka, “Odra”, Vol. 1, January 1981. ↑
11. Wiesław Borowski told Wiesława Wierzchowska: “We did not want the institution to overtake art, we wanted the gallery to remain a weak institution. Institutions always create themselves. They create themselves and soon they pose a threat to the values of art. We always kept that in mimnd. Luckily, the gallery was affiliated with the Visual Art Workshop, an institution whose very name referred to ‘visual arts’ but was far removed from the art we made and talked about. Thus, a gallery attached to that institution had an unusual status and, consequently, some degree of institutional independence”. Wiesław Borowski, O galerii i krytyce, in: Wiesława Wierzchowska, op. cit., p.19. ↑
