ROMAN WOŹNIAK – STATE WITH STUPID AND WISE WOMEN, 1980 (1-1/1)
Poznań 18.11.1980
Performance conducted during the I Biennale of Art in Poznań.
… white table six meters long, 11 heads on the table. White faces, intensely staring at the audience, motionless in the state of concentration or expectation. The sound of a bamboo rattle-box could be heard.
After a moment the viewers started to notice that one of the heads is alive – whitened as the other ones made of papier-mache. It was the author, who was monotonously shaking the rods of the bamboo rattle-box under the table. And nothing else was going on. During five, ten, twenty minutes. The audience, impatient, left the gallery; others waited, probably expecting for some culmination of this weird situation. For almost an hour – before the last viwers have left the gallery. In this motionless performance Woźniak has put the audience (as well as himself) under the time test. Himself, for his fingers were aching because of constant playing on bamboo, while the rest of the body was motionless, and his face stiffened to physical pain, but the time of this immobilization depended on the viewers’ reaction, on the last one to leave the gallery. The audience was put under endurance test, as this event totally deviated from conventional ones – filling the time with rapid action. It seems that for the first time in Poznań Woźniak has presented the state of intensive endurance as a constitutive value of performance. But not only. The Poznań performance was inspired by Biblical story about Wise and Stupid Women (Gospel of Matthew, 25). So it was a specific philosophical story, and I think it could be referred to reality: the artist has counter-posed contemplation to sudden movement of people in post-August Poland, stillness of a single person to a mass pick up. Woźniak seemed to indicate the distance separating everyday reality with its ad-hoc goals from eternity, distance between aggression of collective living and spiritual life of an individual. References to reality „outside” of the work of art impose themselves, although it is hard to assign them to the author as inspirations. (…)
[Grzegorz Kowalski, Polish Sculpture, Annual Issue for 1988 [in:] SIGMA GALERIA REPASSAGE REPASSAGE 2 REREPASSAGE, Warszawa 1993]
