Dokument i kreacja artystyczna jako dopełniające się formy obrazowania rzeczywistości. Rozważania na przykładzie twórczości dwóch artystów
Documentary and Artistic Creation as Complementary Forms of Capturing Reality. A Study of Two Artists

Author(s): Aleksandra Giełdoń-Paszek
Subject(s): Visual Arts
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: pop art; press photographs; Andrzej Strumiłło; Robert Rauschenberg; Combine Painting
Summary/Abstract: The article “Documentary and Artistic Creation as Complementary Forms of Capturing Reality. A Study of Two Artists” constitutes a discussion concerning the essence of documentary photography and its use in painting. In the age of intermedia creation, it is a common and readily accepted practice. In the 1960s, the practice was popularized by pop art artists — Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. The text discusses the formal similarities between two artistic cycles: Robert Rauschenberg’s Combine Painting and Andrzej Strumiłło’s Newspaper Photographs (Fotografie z gazet). Rauschenberg’s works, which illustrate thirty-four cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy, were awarded the main prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale. Strumiłło’s cycle, which was conceived as a “newspaper collection of reality,” was created over a period of multiple years. Its editorial iteration was used as illustration for Strumiłło’s volume of poetry How (1983). Despite the ostensible parallels, both cases present a vastly different approach to the medium they utilize, i.e. documentary photography. Rauschenberg presents the photographs as the expression of the multiplicity of the contemporary world, capturing its increasing tempo, civilizational madness and globalization. Strumiłło, on the other hand, uses the press photos to reflect on the existential aspect of life, emphasizing the relativity of the civilizational values and the concepts we use to describe the world around us.

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