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A fragment of a record of a conference and a meeting held by Tadeusz Kantor at the Dziekanka Club in Warsaw in 1969.
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A record of a meeting with Tadeusz Kantor on 3 March 1973 in his studio in Elbląska Street (Cracow).
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For years Wiesław Borowski assisted Tadeusz Kantor, commenting and popularising his work in Poland and across the world, both during the artist’ lifetime and after his death. Borowski is also the co-author of the idea of establishing the unique Cricoteka centre, which originally was to be situated in Florence and then was created and functioned in Cracow.
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A description of the author’s encounter with Tadeusz Kantor and Joseph Beuys and the heritage of the two wandering artists. J. Jedliński organised numerous displays of works by Beuys and several Kantor shows. Until 2012 each artist was featured at one-man exhibitions. In 2012 the Israel Museum in Jerusalem held the Beuys I Kantor: Remembering exhibition, with Polish-German-Jewish relations as the contents of reconstructed memory. The Beuys and Kantor oeuvreis suffused with memory, and both artists rendered time the matter of their works. Kantor “sought lost time”, while Beuys tried to shape time that was to come. In doing so, they created a total work. Beuys described art as a “vehicle of energy”, searched for an embodiment of “anthropological art” yet to be born, and celebrated “shaman” rituals. Kantor returned to archetypes and clichés, and was an archaeologist of the recollection. he also rebelled against emotions, while Beuys - against ideas.
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A biographical sketch of Joseph Beuys, sculptor and teacher (author of the terms: Theory of Sculpture and Social Sculpture), who attempted to combine opposites in order to set free mental energy. his works were supposed to become an impulse for a therapeutic process within the social organism and to cause the emergence of art in its unattainable completeness as anthropological art, followed by social art. The author of the notion and practice of an “expanded comprehension of art”, Beuys conceived the role of the artist as a mission.
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The sketch depicts Tadeusz Kantor, an artist-pilgrim traversing the world, affiliated with Odysseus-Ulysses, and rendering the journey and the return the artistic motif of his life. Joseph Beuys, Tadeusz Kantor, and James Joyce, another twentieth-century Ulysses, are related realists of the imagination and archaeologists of memory, with epiphany as the characteristic feature of their oeuvre. While painting, creating theatre spectacles, drawing, and staging life and artistic happenings, self-commentaries and spectacles, Kantor performed revelations of the mundane. he assembled spectacles of recollections, put together revues of emotions, and spoke about his “poor room of the imagination”. The themes, distinguished into groups, permeated each other and recurred. The boundary between life and its absence remains fluid. Kantor applied the selfquotation, the travesty, and the paraphrase. he was an archaeologist and a revolutionary who feared immobilization but cultivated the past. Finally, he disclosed reality concealed beneath all forms of illusion and appearances.
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This text is part of a project focused on: The artist as a text. The identity construct of the director as a commentary on theatrical activity, and thus is part of an analysis of the communication strategies applied by Tadeusz Kantor. The author concentrated his attention analysing the score of The Dead Class, which reflects and intermingles prime problems associated with the self-commentary by the recognised artist. On the one hand, the ensuing analysis involved aesthetic transformations connected with inter-semiotic transcription, the translation of one domain of the arts into another (as in the case of a record of a theatrical spectacle). On the other hand, the very structure of a text wavering between a record and a literary work appears to be interesting. Kantor made full use of recording the text (the score is composed of many different literary genres). Another question involves self-commentary – the way in which the artist becomes part of the currently emerging world reception of the work. There occurs a trend towards explaining that is evidently restricted. All these issues were analysed from the viewpoint of the author who became world famous thanks to this work. The way in which biographical questions are mixed with aesthetic ones becomes evident.
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In 1978 Tadeusz Kantor received in Cracow the prestigious Rembrandt Award known also as the “Painters’ Nobel Prize”. It is particularly noteworthy that he was awarded not for the achievements of the Cricot 2 Theatre but for his visual arts oeuvre, with particular emphasis in the emballage. The author wishes to solve a question concerning the nature of the emballage considering that it stirred such great interest inspired by Kantor across the world. The emballage was not a painting although even the artist placed it in this category. Technically, in the initial phase, it was an object (mainly an umbrella) attached to a canvas. Subsequently, it turned into a form of wrapping the protagonists of happenings in paper in order to pass into a different configuration concerning the merge of man and object. In the case of emballages of ideas paper bags contained abstract slogans referring to conceits from the range of the history of art. A separate category involves the works of other artists and wrapping oneself and one’s mother. An idea essential for the definition of the concept entails also the journey and the figure of the traveller carrying on his back the burden of all his accomplishments. An analysis of the development of the concept of the emballage makes it possible to discover a fine thread of connections with the gestures of other artists with creative biographies, such as Stanisław Wyspiański. The conducted analysis introduced Jan Matejko, Marcel Duchamp, and even Samuel Beckett. Despite the artist’s strenuous efforts, the homogeneous idea evades an unambiguous definition. The dynamic nature of the conception is partly the result of the artist’s activities, gradually introducing it into assorted domains and adapting it to planned gestures. At the end of his life Kantor declared: “I find the emballage very precious and do not wish to leave it at the mercy of dubious interpreters”.
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The art of Tadeusz Kantor reveals discernible and incessant strife with subjectivity and a sui generisgame played with the mirrors of identity. Such self-observation is served not only by the theatre stage and the characters appearing on it, but also the artist’s activity in the realm of the visual arts. Eternity and death, emergence and concealment, isolation and message are manifested in transitions upwards from profundity, and from nothingness towards motion as well as in the human-inhuman actors-objects. Marionettes, puppets, kuklasand mannequins are an omnipresent motif in Kantor’s oeuvre. Artificial but created as a semblance of man they too overcome the presence / non-presence opposition. According to this interpretation emptiness (and isolation) is for the awareness most terrifying because ultimately it proves to be all that exists.
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Tadeusz Kantor holds a distinctive position among theatrical artists opting for assorted figures (from mannequins to puppets and marionettes). having rejected the theories expounded by Kleist and Craig about the impersonal actor (mannequin, Übermarionette) Kantor conjured reflections pursued by Bruno Schulz, who in his Traktat o manekinachproclaimed theories about second demiurgic creation, associated with Kantor’s vision of “a reality of lower rank”. Kantor implemented his conceptions both during the initial period of “the autonomous theatre” and the end phase of “the theatre of death”. The figures and reistic images, which he introduced onto the stage, were not subjective since they were not complete stage characters although they signified more than commonplace props. The Kantor oeuvre coincides with a period of great interest in the impersonal actor, revealed in numerous attempts at its use by other artists working parallel to Kantor’s initiatives. Some exceeded him, as in the case of Meyerhold, who under the impact of the German Romantics often opted for the marionette style in his spectacles. Plebeian puppetry traditions (i.a. the commedia dell’arte) were revived slightly later by Armand Gaetti and Dario Fo. In her Théâtre du Soleil Ariane Mnouchkine was inspired by the Asian theatre, although its models served the creation of “European” metaphors.Numerous younger artists had already succumbed to the impact exerted by Kantor, such as Stephane Braunschweig, who in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (Orleans, 1992) applied “the doubling of figures”. This principle also served the presentation of the inner world of the protagonists, e.g. in the works of Didier-Georges Gabin or Mathias Langhoff. Moreover, the impersonal actor evoked Enlightenment-era automatons, as in Don Giovanni (Geneva, 1991). Mechanical elements (albeit not exclusively) were introduced onto the stage by the Canadian artist Robert Lepage (in, i.a., The Far Side of the Moon,2000). It became apparent that the metaphorical force of the puppet and other forms of the impersonal actor is endless. Artists devised new applications, thus confirming the words of Jakub, a character from the prose by Bruno Schulz, in Street of Crocodiles (a spectacle staged by the Simon McBurney Théâtre de Complicité in 1992): “Matter remains in a state of incessant fermentation”.Numerous other examples of the application of figures, mannequins, and puppets include a long account of the spectacle War Horse (2007), directed by Tom Morris and Marianne Elliott (London) and dominated by a magnificent animated horse similar to Kantor’s “rider from a small legend”. The article ends with a presentation of new tendencies in the puppet theatre, which to a certain extent grows similar to the actor’s theatre: the activity of people comprises a backdrop for demonstrating puppets endowed with symbolic meanings.
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An analysis of a series of paintings by Tadeusz Kantor: One Does Not Look into the Window with Impunity, conducted in reference to his last theatrical works. Late paintings by Tadeusz Kantor from the second half of the 1980s constitute an art of borderline situations similarly as the last Cricot 2 Theatre spectacles. All the canvases contain an inscribed undecidability balancing on the border, a game played with presence - absence, perception – non-perception, reality - fiction, life - death, memory – projection, time - timelessness, historical necessity – individual freedom, and catastrophe - hope for salvation and redemption. The pulsating “between the two” is accompanied by the construction of imprisonment, discernible in almost all of Kantor’s late works. It became the key concept of the spectacle: Let the Artists Die (1985), in which Kantor compared the condition of creation to that of a prison. It is also present in an extremely tangible manner in his last production: Today is My Birthday(1991), balancing between reality and illusion.
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This text is a fragment of a diploma thesis written under prof. Dariusz Czaja: Manekin, lalka, teatr. Studium z antropologii świata rzeczy dealing with the anthropology of the theatre. As an attempt at analysing the status of the mannequin in Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death it refers also to widely conceived ritualism and concentrates on the metaphysical aspects of Kantor’s art.
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An attempt at a transition from a presentation of certain artistic and anthropological concepts – often indicated by Tadeusz Kantor as the essential context of his oeuvre– to real places and people. In the artist’s language the “birthplace” is the space of personal experience and contact with one’s memory, in which there takes place the profound and almost impossible task of reconstruction. Its purpose is to recreate the reminiscence, to save from oblivion, and to halt the flow of time. The attitude represented by Kantor towards photography and the manner in which he applied the latter in his Theatre of Death consists of an attempt at (re)animating that, which has been suspended and lasts within the image. The article proposes a certain interpretation perspective for Kantor’s last spectacles, based on identifications by Sławomir Mrożek, Dariusz Czaja, and Jan Kott.
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A description of meetings held by the Kantor Workshop (under the supervision of the author of the text) in the Theatre Institute in Warsaw (Spring 2104).
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The author ponders on the pictorial conception of the titular spectacle and the paradoxes set into motion by Kantor’s emphasis on the fiction between the stage and the painter’s studio. In doing so, she poses questions and reflects on the reason why in Today is My Birthday the artist returned to the image and theatrical pictorial qualities conceived as a stage trick enrooted in the visual arts. Why did he introduce into the spectacle an almost painterly conception of reality, creating a stage with paintings on easels, and operate with the effect of a tableau vivant as well as spatially actuated photography?
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The author of this sketch – the director of Cricoteka – discusses the latter’s history, activity, and events from the past decade. In 1993 Cricoteka became a state cultural institution of particular rank for national culture. Its purpose is to commemorate the accomplishments of Tadeusz Kantor as well as to render available and popularise his theatrical and visual art oeuvre and ideas. Cricoteka also publishes, organises scientific sessions, and holds exhibitions popularising the art of Tadeusz Kantor both at home and abroad.
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Author’s reflections about Japanes artists Olta “group of seven artists born in the 80s”. On the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Tadeusz Kantor a symposium From Witkacy to Kantor… and Then What? was held at Theater X, in Tokyo, on 18th of April 2015, there were also several meetings during Parasophia – Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015, Kyoto, 12th of April 2015.
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A portrait and an analysis of the works of the Italian-Armenian duo of filmmakers: Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, whose oeuvre is a sui generis archaeology of the cinema and, at the same time, of the twentieth century. The Gianikians’ found footage films tackling the themes of conflicts and catastrophes are a monument of sorts created to commemorate anonymous victims, migrants, and the extras (actors) of history. At the same time, they criticize the very category of beauty as ambivalent and susceptible to totalitarian appropriation and usage. The essay touches also a problem of postcolonial hauntology in works of Ricci Lucchi / Gianikian as well as the “cinematographic forms of history”.
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The author presented his work at the IV International Sokolovsko Festival of Ephemeral Art KONTEKSTY (1 August 2014). Static photographs of the heirs of World War I New Zealand regiments were “set into motion” to create an unusual installation of a moving image accompanied by sound.
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