Refleksje wokół ujawniania – lub obramowania – rzeczy
Reflections on the Disclosing – or Framing – of Things

Summary/Abstract: This article explores some conditions of thinking through archives, specifically when what is in question is the event of an encounter with an artistic project. Taking Tchorek and Kantor as conceptual personae engaged with this question – speaking of archival legacies and transmission in the cases of the Foksal, the Cricoteka, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, and the Tchorek-Bentall Foundation – the article addresses such questions as the following: with respect to these archives, how might the conceptual personae of Tchorek and Kantor allow us to map something of the theoretical constellations that they name within European art history? What if the spirit of Tchorek was not only present in the past future of the Foksal archive, but also in a future past of the Cricoteka? How might reading Tchorek allow us to re-read Kantor without simply repeating him (as if the questions he himself posed were already the answers proposed)? How do notions of “archive” relate to those of “place”? What kind of a “thing” might either one disclose the other to be? And what kinds of thing are haunting in the impression they make on what they are not? What kind of artwork could an archive be – not only conceptually but also, in some “impossible” sense (at least, in Kantor’s terms), practically? Indeed, might Kantor’s emballage offer an example of a “theory’”– in practice – of Tchorek’s “place”? How and why do “things” become institutionally visible in the way they are imagined afterwards through the claims of art historians or theatre scholars? How, in such a case, does an archive relate to the question of an art practice? And how, to begin with, to distinguish quotation from ventriloquism, especially in a language that one does not understand?

• Details
• Contents