Filmoteka Muzeum

Marx Now, a piece Kwiek presented at the BWA in Lublin during an artist meeting and exhibition called Zapisy, is an iconoclastic Activity performed around central ideological representations of the People’s Republic of Poland. Having a pile of white sheets of paper before him, Kwiek drew and explained consecutive stages of a work which had been prepared for an International Mail Art Show in Arnhem on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Karl Marx’s death. He cut the top of Marx’s head from a portrait, ‘de-braining’ him, leaving only the eyes and the lower part of the face. Revisiting an idea of Kulik’s, he then drew a Polish flag but replaced its white colour with the word ‘FOG’, and its red colour with the word ‘BLOOD’. Thus, Marx’s eyes were embedded in the fog of the Polish flag, while his lips and nose in ‘blood’. The whole composition was placed on Malevich’s Black Square. Although the artists used the Polish red-and-white flag, there was practically no red colour in the entire composition.