Łódź as an Archive: “Taking stock of a city by art. Neo-avant-garde art as a repository for images of Łódź from 1970-1990.”
Łódź as an Archive: “Taking stock of a city by art. Neo-avant-garde art as a repository for images of Łódź from 1970-1990.”

Summary/Abstract: My article is an attempt to read the art history images outside the aesthetic or artistic discourse. Analyzing artworks from the neo-avant-garde art of the seventies and eighties from the artistic circle of Łódź, I saw in many of them an extraordinary documentation of the city of Łódź of that time. Taking into account the privileged position of Łódź on the artistic map of Poland of that time, a strong local circle of media artists using photography, film, video, and the discovery of the peculiarity of the urban structure of Łódź, I learned that Łódź has probably been registered by artworks better that any other Polish city. As no other city Łódź became a symbol and a point of reference to many neo-avant-garde artists of that time. Thus, I decided to approach some images from the history of neo-avant-garde art as a repository of the urban structure and images of Łódź. I organized my text as a series of passages ordered by different types of inventorying functions of art – playing with the city’s vivid and changing structure, documenting the city, using the city as a laboratory, annexing the city’s space. Thus, my article is meant as a commentary to a set of images, which create together a kind of atlas of the city of Łódź in this particular period. On a different level, my article raises such questions: how can art be used outside its most obvious disciplines such as art critique, art history, art theory, to what extent can art serve as a document within a historical or urbanistic discourse? My analysis aims at treating the neo-avant-garde art not only as a vehicle for a visual information but also as an example of how the artistic phenomenon can correlate with the peculiar context of its urban and historical milieu. How history and space of the city can be told by means of art history. History where the documents are being replaced by artworks.

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