The Genius of the Artist in the Psychological Dimension, 1986. (1-1/1)
The work was made in 1986 during the period Libera was fascinated with spatial form, realised among others via cycle of collages („Criminality of an act on the example of Zbigniew Libera“, „Intimate rites - plate“). In the collage the artist used and juxtaposed his earlier works - “Somebody else” and the cycle devoted to the ailing and dying of artist's grandmother.
Plate consists of six parts, each of which represents another emotional state, sometimes real, and sometimes being a concept of artist himself (psychological astenicism, homilopathy, depersonalisation, sociopathy, love), and each of them is realised via characters' dialogue, coming both from the works about transvestite and those about the grandmother.
It is exactly that confrontation of seemingly contradictory characters (older, dying woman and a young man dressing as a woman) on which the main assumption concerning human behaviour universality – those of social, and those of personal kind, physiological and purely emotional as well. The artist notices that the non-verbal human contact facilitates direct communication, which in verbalised language of meanings and symbols is frequently deformed.
Zbigniew Libera, as a representant of critical art, relies here upon an assumption, held by him also in his other works, that it is precisely the social conventions and imposed rigid frames of human contact which render creating an interpersonal sphere, where individuals may communicate via simple mutual presence, impossible. If we reject all rituals and contexts, then human relations will come back to their primordial, natural foundations, where language is an artificial or even redundant instrument.
