Gorączka i popiół. O Muzeum Sztuki Zdeponowanej Roberta Kuśmirowskiego
Fever and Ashes. Robert Kuśmirowski’s Museum of Deposited Art

Summary/Abstract: According to Paul Ricoeur all sorts of traces are suitable for archivisation; among them he mentioned also urns. In Robert Kuśmirowski’s “Museum of Deposited Art”, sometimes known as the “art columbarium”, urns are used for storing works of art – unrequired, unsuccessful, unexamined, forgotten, small losers in the world of art – cremated in the presence of a committee. “I only wish to take care of them – declares the artist – to extract them from non-existence and to somehow preserve them in memory. With suitable theoretical and conceptual care they lose nothing and merely change their parameters”. The Museum preserves the remnants, writes a destruction protocol, and keeps records. The Kuśmirowski project – a sui generis museum of the imagination defeated in a confrontation with the scale of present-day artistic production – is an extreme institution, in which it would seem that the frenzy of cataloguing and compulsory commemoration had ultimately ousted the seemingly fundamental purpose: in order to save from oblivion one has to destroy. Contrary to other fears expressed by Jean Clair and addressed to museums in which instead of presence we find emptiness, the latter appears to be some sort of a solution. After all, to deposit also means to place in a grave, but not without hope. Kuśmirowski appears to refer to the great pariahs of art by citing Pierre Nora: “Archive as much as you like: something will always be left!”.

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