![Artysta „celuje” tak samo jak snajper](/api/image/getissuecoverimage?id=picture_2015_27545.jpg)
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The author describes her experience giving lectures on classical and contemporary art for cultural institutions in Kyiv.
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Family members recollect Andrzej Panufnik – Polish composer and director who in 1954 emigrated to England. The authorities of People’s Poland issued a censorship ban on the performance and publication of his compositions, not revoked until 1977.
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Series of texts about Andrzej Klimowski, a renown Polish artist and graphic designer.
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A conversation concerning Portrait Without a Face – an exhibition and album by Krzysztof Gierałtowski presenting a series of photographs of eminent representatives of Polish culture and politics. While recounting the circumstances of the origin of particular photographs their author disclosed workshop arcana and portrayed the characteristic style of his creative photography.
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An account of a meeting discussing Marta Kufel’s book: „Błędne Betlejem Tadeusza Kantora” (2013), which took place in the Theatre Institute in Warsaw.
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An essay on the works of Bettina Bereś, locating them within the perspective of a discussion about experiencing daily life and the “female experience” as well as within the context of the concept of “bustling about” described by Jolanta Brach-Czaina. Another counterpoint to Bettina Bereś’ oeuvre is her mother, Maria Pinińska-Bereś.
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Franciszka and Stefan Themerson’s achievements are becoming increasingly popular among Polish researchers. Although the artistic work of ‘Drobiazg melodyjny’ authors inspired the appearance of an extensive academic literature, also for the general public, it seems that the Themersons remain artists who are not studied in depth and that many research topics connected with them have not yet been discovered. What lies behind this situation is not only versatility of their interests and an extensive output, but also a distant location of the archive they left, whose major part remained in Great Britain until the end of 2014. The article concerns new research perspectives, especially those connected with film output, which arose when almost whole Themersons’ legacy was brought to Poland. Undoubtedly the presence of the archive in our native country will enable the analysis of so far either unknown or no well researched areas of life and activity of the extraordinary tandem.
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Much has been said and written about the communication role played by the paper poster, which still reigned in the 1990s. New ways of transmitting information and omnipresent cyberspace have completely altered both the forms of communication and that of the communiqué as such. The author attempted to answer a question about the contemporary condition of the poster.
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Fragment of the book: Grotowski w praniu, to be printed by the Jerzy Grotowski Institute in Wrocław and in English by Icarus Publishing Enterprise as: Grotowski: Lost and Found. At a conference held in Toronto in October 1980 Jerzy Grotowski formulated the pragmatics of his Theatre of Sources. This undertaking was realised at a special time: the first so-called practical seminar took place in the summer of 1980s when a tide of strikes resulting in the establishment of the “Solidarity” trade union swept across Poland. The second practical seminar, planned for 1982, was prepared by an international company touring Poland in 1981 – a period of a tumultuous domestic conflict and a constant threat of military invasion by the Warsaw Pact, which in December resulted in the proclamation of martial law. At the October 1980 conference Grotowski defined the conditions in which the effectiveness of the conducted quests should be tested.
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Upon the examples of well-known operas staged in recent years at Teatr Wielki in Warsaw and the Metropolitan Opera in New York the author demonstrated the manner in which operas refer directly to the unconscious by means of fundamental problems concerning love, death, and insanity. Operas compel us to face the “I – the Other” question, as in The Merchant of Venice or Othello, and immediately pose a question about the Other within me, as in the case of Tristan und Isolde or Turandot. The character of the opera performance in which the plot turns into dream, a figment of the imagination, and an inner drama “assigned” to particular protagonists, undergoes a change. The application of such analytical thinking makes it possible to comprehend the psychological structure of the protagonists and the problem in which it is embroiled. The presented text shows how the opera, while seemingly featuring “insane” dramatis personae, actually refers to the psychic dilemmas of each of us, makes it possible to identify ourselves with them, and turns a night at the opera into a magical ritual.
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An essay-reminiscence by Edgar Morin about the works and life of Roland Barthes, originally published in the periodical “Communications” in 1982.
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A recorded conversation held by Wiesław Juszczak and Dariusz Czaja about three outstanding film directors: Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, and Andréa Wajda and their works. This fragment is from: Ruiny czasu albo o twórczości.
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This essay endeavours to solve a question about the character of the “Wprost” group: a chance to create a community of persons (probably as a reference to Personalism) expressing within an artistic and social context experiences shared with recipients without enclosing themselves within the range of art and the autotelic character of its goals and tastes. As an informal group of friends “Wprost” believed in the language of images also by resorting to the tradition of European art and its iconological interpretation. It rejected post-Kapist aestheticization – this being a period of a strong impact exerted by the norms of that particular group – and the progressiveness of avantgarde extremists.
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This two-part essay focuses on two photographs: Image irrationnelle, by Raoul Ubac and a portrait of Michel Leiris standing next to a sculpture of the African god Gu. The former inclines us to consider the boundary between man and animal, and the latter to reflect on the status of the autobiographical quality in the process of creation.
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Cesare Zavattini wrote that Neorealism remained an art of “fragmentary, ephemeral, piecemeal, missed encounters”. This text is an attempt at examining “Neorealist” photographs taken in the 1950s by Marek Piasecki, Jerzy Lewczyński, Zofia Rydet, Zdzisław Beksiński, and Tadeusz Rolke, and their relation towards the cinema, i.e. as takes from a never made Neorealist motion picture. Neorealism, together with its programme-like escape from subjecting reality to any sort of initial premises, its inconclusiveness, flight from didacticism, and finally – and this feature is perhaps of key importance – its unclear perception, was a sui generis “materialistic metaphysics of everyday life”, disclosing the ambiguity of a world shattered into fragments. By the very force of things, photographs taken by Piasecki, Lewczyński or Beksiński and evoking this aesthetic, became an instrument of a decolonisation of perceiving the reality of the early stage of People’s Poland, showed the then “undepicted world”, and, finally, was a sui generis visual, non-academic “anthropology”. The pretext for these reflections is the year 1947: a time of the worldwide triumph of the Neorealist cinema, the beginning of rebuilding Warsaw, the onset of Stalinism in Poland, and, finally – and this could be of utmost prominence – the year of the establishment of the periodical “Polska Sztuka Ludowa” (today: “Konteksty”).
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This text presents the state of research, proposes a systematic approach, and, upon its basis, conducts a synthesis of heretofore works by Aneta Grzeszykowska (b. 1974). Despite a number of press articles as well as critical and scientific texts, Grzeszykowska’s œuvre continues to evade reflections while the relatively large number of her one-man and group shows becomes the reason why an outside observer finds it difficult to establish the sequence of her projects and relations within the range of particular sets of works. This text contains a chronological reconstruction of Grzeszykowska’s artistic development spanning from her early student works, executed together with Jan Smaga, to the most recent undertakings, whose effects are shown at exhibitions held in Poland and abroad or are published as art books (e.g. Negative Book or Selfie). A. Mazur arranged the artist’s oeuvre in order from the vantage point of its themes (initial interest in architecture, questions of identity and objectivity, pastiche and repetition, feminism) and the media (from photography via video to sculpture and performance). A reconstruction of the state of research and an amassment of possible paths of interpretation enabled the author to present his personal vision of Grzeszykowska’s art.
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This article about the Polish dancer Yanka Rudzka attempts an anthropological and historical analysis of the creation of the contemporary art of the dance in Brazil. During the 1950s Rudzka emigrated to Brazil where she was invited to establish the first national dance university in the state of Bahia. Her pioneering project encompassed the techniques of the Expressionistic and Afro dance, an approach that at the time was a genuine sensation. Despite the fact that Rudzka did not hold the post of the course coordinator for long her several years-long presence in Bahia made a significant contribution to the decolonisation of Brazilian art and science. The outcome of in-depth studies conducted by the author in 2014-2015 as part of the Yanka Rudzka Polish-Brazilian project concerning the life and oeuvre of the Polish artist Yanka Rudzka. The text concentrates predominantly on her pioneering approach to creation, merging elements of the contemporary dance and anthropological observation. Within this context Rudzka’s works provided foundations for a new paradigm of the performing arts, based on a creative combination of Afro-Brazilian tradition and modern arts. From the early 1960s such an approach became increasingly popular in north-eastern Brazil and today is one of the dominating aesthetic tendencies in this region. The presented publication was prepared for a research session organised by the author with the cooperation of the School of Dance at the Federal University of Bahia and the VIVADANÇA festival (April 2016). This meeting summed up the oeuvre of the Polish dancer within the context of the history of the performing arts in Brazil.
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This reconstruction of the artistic biography of Igor Mitoraj combines assorted facts from his life with the artist’s self-commentary, i.e. their subjective interpretations borrowed from the interviews, which he gave and from the scarce texts, which he wrote. In those interviews Mitoraj spoke about his oeuvre, recalled certain events from his life, and revealed his attitude towards other sculptors. May this subjective-objective story about the artist’s life, the path leading from Cracow to imaginary Ithaca, described in this chapter, simultaneously perform the part of an initial and most general introduction to the secrets of Mitoraj’s oeuvre as a sculptor. In reviews, whose fragments are cited in the essay, Mitoraj explained the mysterious operations, incomprehensible at first glance, to which he subjected his works, such as the significance attached to bandaging the faces of his statues or the meaning of the rectangular gashes on their bodies, which he called “cuts”. For a researcher dealing with Mitoraj’s works, such a self-commentary and self-interpretation comprise a valuable contribution to reconstructing the artist’s creative process, the recreation of the universum of his imagination, the reestablishment of the paths of analogies and associations, and the process of becoming familiar with the applied sculptural and painting techniques (encaustic painting) – in a word, a prefatory and most comprehensive introduction to the world of the art of Igor Mitoraj.
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An attempt at deciphering the gesture of a hand featured on a theatre poster designed by Henryk Tomaszewski for the drama Hadrian VII (1969). The introduction briefly recollects the selected functions performed by the hand, with emphasis placed on mnemonics (the art of memory) and chirognomy (chirology). The author went on to analyse the significance of the hand motif on posters by Henryk Tomaszewski and examined their eventual connection with chirognomy and chirology – the ways in which hands speak, i.e. an inseparable element of rhetoric established in antiquity and still applied in the nineteenth century. After the introduction the author advanced ad rem, demonstrating that the gesture shown on the examined poster does not signify the Arabic 7 or the letter H, but is an originally depicted Roman VII indicated by the index finger, here unnaturally elongated due to its function. To conclude: apparently in the case of works by renowned artists classical research methodology proves ineffective.
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