Art on the brink, ergo the margin of life: Marek Chlanda’s The Tango of Death
Art on the brink, ergo the margin of life: Marek Chlanda’s The Tango of Death

Summary/Abstract: Marek Chlanda’s sketch Cosmos – Tango of Death was created as a picture of the artist’s yearning for sense. This sketch and the triptych are based on the photo from 1942 taken at the extermination camp in Janowska Street in Lvov. The photo shows a circle of musicians-prisoners, who play the Tango of Death on the SS-men’s order. The sketch quite accurately repeats the ‘composition’ of the photo. Here an artist puts the viewers in the face of the literal and metaphorical understanding of the marginal: the group of musicians is situated in the center of the drawing, but the margins of this work are filled with the artist’s notes. My reflections do not concern marginalization in general, but the marginalization of the artist and art on the brink of life, indirectly and probably briefly involved in the machinery of extermination. I want to reflect on the incredibility of the existence of art during the Holocaust. I analyze how contemporary artist tries to penetrate into that special event, through the thought and premonition of future, provoked by William Blake’s poems and drawings. The black and white photograph, which presents a group of musicians playing the Tango of Death is literally a representation of a segment of the circle of the camp orchestra, whose remaining fragment, invisible in the photograph, is located off the frame. On the other hand – it is symbolic because it documents the existence of this odd orchestra in the death camp and factually depicts its membership.

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