Alina Szapocznikow Documents. Works. Interpretations
Piotr Juszkiewicz

The main problem of the paper is defined by the question how to talk productively about the relation between artwork and biography after we had been made aware of the losses and gains which result from acknowledging the death of the author, this given, accepted unconditionally by the methodologically conscious researcher.

Having been pre-warned about the dangers of ideology, discouraged by the reductionism of biographical interpretation and reductionist claims of psychoanalysis, perhaps we can find a way to make the subject and the problem of the subject’s identity present by changing the question about history (biography) into the question about the source experience of the having been of being and the world, in which the subject has been, as a being. What is even more important, we need to formulate the question about the relation between the artwork and its history (the biography of the artist) as a question about the possibility of projecting source thinking about history—that is, the having been of being and its world, to which the artwork belonged, the co-presence of being in historical community—onto the history of the artwork, including its slippage out of the world to which it once belonged.

See also: