Polish Performance Archive

Description by Filmoteka Muzeum

In the performance carried out in Bergen, Norway, Dawicki creates a complex performative and spatial structure based on reversal and paradoxical juxtaposition. He begins standing still next to a statue on the plinth, as if he wanted to become its living counterpart. This act can be understood as a symptom of the negotiations of the artist’s entanglement in the oeuvre of the “great forerunners” and the pursuit of reconciliation (legitimising) his own, fresh and fragile practice with the burden of the achievements of great artists from the past. A statue appears also in the form of a tiny figurine posed on the washing machine, which in turn is used by the artist to wash excrements, featured together with a white lily. The washing machine, though fouled with senseless labour, is polished on the outside by the artist. Thus, the performance is based on the antinomies presented here in a poetic and slightly transgressive manner, which relates it to the practice of Zbigniew Warepchowski – Dawicki’s mentor. However, as opposed to Warpechowski, who structured his essentialist performances as urgent and serious inquiries into the basic questions of being and the world, Dawicki emanates the spirit of profanation while relating the created signs to void.
 

(ŁM)