"Questions" by Grzegorz Kowalski
Book Promotion
Museum of Modern Art invites to a promotional meeting of "Grzegorz Kowalski. Questions" book.
Grzegorz Kowalski’s book, "Questions", recalls three actions/questions from the turn of the 1970s/1980s when the artist was actively involved at Warsaw’s Repassage gallery: "Would You and Would You Like to Portray an Animal in Front of the Camera?" (1977-1978); "Would You and Would You Like to Treat Me Like an Object" (1979), and "Would You Like to Return to Your Mother’s Womb?" (1981-1987).
For Kowalski, who studied under Oskar Hansen and was intimately familiar with his Open Form theory, art was a form of communication. He used existential questions to provoke friends and sometimes strangers to look within themselves. He would then collate the replies – short texts and posed photographs – into tableaux or art books. Kowalski so described the "Questions" process: When nagging questions emerge, I try to ask them to several other persons in order to learn their reactions. This creates a sum total of reactions, a statement no longer just mine but ours. A multiplicity of reflexes reflected, as in mirrors, in other people’s experiences. A person who needed contact with an art work becomes involved in the process of its making.
Today, a book form seems most fitting for presenting Kowalski’s intimate and personal actions/questions. Wherever possible, the Mundin publication retains the original layout.
Only in a few cases the original photograph has been replaced with another. "Questions" concludes with an appendix, explaining the contributors’ relationship with the artist and the context and meaning of their replies. An introduction has been written by the art critic Karol Sienkiewicz, laureate of the Jerzy Stajuda Prize for Art Criticism.