Coming Soon (arrière-garde)
16 - 25 Apr 2012
COMING SOON (arrière-garde)
curator: Stach Szabłowski
asociate curator: Zuzanna M. Koszuta
16 – 26 April 2012
Kuba Bąkowski, Olaf Brzeski, Paweł Eibel, Piotr Grabowski, Norman Leto, Jacek Malinowski, Tomasz Mróz, Ewa Naporowska, Wojtek Pustoła, Konrad Smoleński, Radek Szlaga, Monika Zawadzki
Coming Soon (Arričre-Garde) is a presentation of works by selected artists from Poland, but it does not aim to answer questions like ‘What’s up in Polish art’; it is not a mirror in which a representative image of an ‘artistic scene’ is reflected. The subject of Coming Soon are the individual practices and works of the featured artists, the exhibition providing a narrative frame for their presentation. This is a narrative about a fragile present, uncertain future, and a sense of an impending change, after which nothing – neither art nor reality – will ever be the same again.
After the fall of communism, contemporary art found itself in the avant-garde of social change in Poland. Artists fought in the front line of the cultural wars that accompanied the great modernisation project. The object of that project was, most shortly, to create a modern, secular, tolerant, democratic society in Poland that would produce and consume the fruits of free-market economy. In other words, Poles’ ambition was to make their reality similar to that in Old Europe, which for them defined the level of aspirations in terms of both living standards and civic virtues.
Sometimes one can hardly get rid of the disturbing thought that Poland made the effort to become like Old Europe too late and thus in vain. The European project is bursting at the seams and the West is saying nothing about its own future. It can be suspected we are preparing for a role in a show that is about to be taken off the bill.
Cologne, the city where Coming Soon is presented, seems a quintessence of Old Europe. If Old Europe, an area of democracy, prosperity and order really exists anywhere, it is precisely here. It is one of those places one can hardly imagine a better future for than its present. One can very easily think of it as a place where things are already well – and can only get worse. But it will surely be adifferent case. The status quo will not last forever (though that is perhaps what we would really like to happen). The change will occur soon. And, for the first time in the history of European modernity, it will not be the result of the fulfilment of yet another great political or social project.
This time, quite simply, it has proved impossible to invent the future. In this situation, the notion of the avant-garde no longer makes sense. Let us imagine artists who move from the head of the procession to the rear, forming the read guard, or arričre-garde, of late modernity, drifting into the unknown.
What does the arričre-garde do? The artists featured in Coming Soon are part of a generation that did not overthrow communism and did not participate in the heroic period of Polish transformation. Waiting for new paradigms, they try to define them for themselves. This is reflected in the shape of the exhibition, which brings together very diverse artistic practices that refuse to be pigeonholed into any political or aesthetic agenda. Here, Olaf Brzeski’s animistic sculptures meet the trashy sub-realism of Radek Szlaga and Tomasz Mróz’s puppet theatre of hysterical expression clashes with the virtual spaces of digital simulations, in which Norman Leto deconstructs, with scientific cruelty, the delusions of humanism. The post-industrial, ironic romance of Kuba Bąkowski’s photographs and installations contrasts with the apocalyptic minimalism of Konrad Smolenski’s audio piece. The connections between the different works are far from being clear, but only as far as the reality in which we have found ourselves is murky. The exhibition is also streaked with the same anxiety with which we look into the future. An exhibition of grotesque images, of weakened matter that loses form, of false prophecies and distant landscapes that turn out to be mirages. In the ranks of the arriere-garde, in the rear, things are far less regulated than in the disciplined rows of the front guard, the avant-garde; here, the order of things becomes relaxed. Radek Szlaga installs burnt-out cars which will not take us anywhere while Konrad Smoleski arranges microphones that speak instead of listening. Posed as a romantic traveller, Wojtek Pustoła reaches the end of the road and vomits out of excess the beauty of a perfect landscape and Piotr Grabowski asks about the Delphic oracle and receives wrong answers only. In the show’s dark corner breeds a monster, a power-dreaming vampire that Jacek Malinowski wakes up from its pop-cultural dream. In another place, Tomasz Mróz builds an Ark; a rescue boat for what he feels is an impending cataclysm. On the horizon looms the tropical forest of Paweł Eibel’s photographs, the paradise from Apocalypse Now, a moment before the napalm catastrophe. Norman Leto shows the Black Sun and Kuba Bąkowski the Polaris – two navigation stars, orientation points in a trip into the unknown. Both prove equally deceiving because, as the Incredible Hulk says in another of Bąkowski’s works, ‘The question is more about not where we are as when we are’.
Stach Szabłowski
curator: Stach Szabłowski
asociate curator: Zuzanna M. Koszuta
16 – 26 April 2012
Kuba Bąkowski, Olaf Brzeski, Paweł Eibel, Piotr Grabowski, Norman Leto, Jacek Malinowski, Tomasz Mróz, Ewa Naporowska, Wojtek Pustoła, Konrad Smoleński, Radek Szlaga, Monika Zawadzki
Coming Soon (Arričre-Garde) is a presentation of works by selected artists from Poland, but it does not aim to answer questions like ‘What’s up in Polish art’; it is not a mirror in which a representative image of an ‘artistic scene’ is reflected. The subject of Coming Soon are the individual practices and works of the featured artists, the exhibition providing a narrative frame for their presentation. This is a narrative about a fragile present, uncertain future, and a sense of an impending change, after which nothing – neither art nor reality – will ever be the same again.
After the fall of communism, contemporary art found itself in the avant-garde of social change in Poland. Artists fought in the front line of the cultural wars that accompanied the great modernisation project. The object of that project was, most shortly, to create a modern, secular, tolerant, democratic society in Poland that would produce and consume the fruits of free-market economy. In other words, Poles’ ambition was to make their reality similar to that in Old Europe, which for them defined the level of aspirations in terms of both living standards and civic virtues.
Sometimes one can hardly get rid of the disturbing thought that Poland made the effort to become like Old Europe too late and thus in vain. The European project is bursting at the seams and the West is saying nothing about its own future. It can be suspected we are preparing for a role in a show that is about to be taken off the bill.
Cologne, the city where Coming Soon is presented, seems a quintessence of Old Europe. If Old Europe, an area of democracy, prosperity and order really exists anywhere, it is precisely here. It is one of those places one can hardly imagine a better future for than its present. One can very easily think of it as a place where things are already well – and can only get worse. But it will surely be adifferent case. The status quo will not last forever (though that is perhaps what we would really like to happen). The change will occur soon. And, for the first time in the history of European modernity, it will not be the result of the fulfilment of yet another great political or social project.
This time, quite simply, it has proved impossible to invent the future. In this situation, the notion of the avant-garde no longer makes sense. Let us imagine artists who move from the head of the procession to the rear, forming the read guard, or arričre-garde, of late modernity, drifting into the unknown.
What does the arričre-garde do? The artists featured in Coming Soon are part of a generation that did not overthrow communism and did not participate in the heroic period of Polish transformation. Waiting for new paradigms, they try to define them for themselves. This is reflected in the shape of the exhibition, which brings together very diverse artistic practices that refuse to be pigeonholed into any political or aesthetic agenda. Here, Olaf Brzeski’s animistic sculptures meet the trashy sub-realism of Radek Szlaga and Tomasz Mróz’s puppet theatre of hysterical expression clashes with the virtual spaces of digital simulations, in which Norman Leto deconstructs, with scientific cruelty, the delusions of humanism. The post-industrial, ironic romance of Kuba Bąkowski’s photographs and installations contrasts with the apocalyptic minimalism of Konrad Smolenski’s audio piece. The connections between the different works are far from being clear, but only as far as the reality in which we have found ourselves is murky. The exhibition is also streaked with the same anxiety with which we look into the future. An exhibition of grotesque images, of weakened matter that loses form, of false prophecies and distant landscapes that turn out to be mirages. In the ranks of the arriere-garde, in the rear, things are far less regulated than in the disciplined rows of the front guard, the avant-garde; here, the order of things becomes relaxed. Radek Szlaga installs burnt-out cars which will not take us anywhere while Konrad Smoleski arranges microphones that speak instead of listening. Posed as a romantic traveller, Wojtek Pustoła reaches the end of the road and vomits out of excess the beauty of a perfect landscape and Piotr Grabowski asks about the Delphic oracle and receives wrong answers only. In the show’s dark corner breeds a monster, a power-dreaming vampire that Jacek Malinowski wakes up from its pop-cultural dream. In another place, Tomasz Mróz builds an Ark; a rescue boat for what he feels is an impending cataclysm. On the horizon looms the tropical forest of Paweł Eibel’s photographs, the paradise from Apocalypse Now, a moment before the napalm catastrophe. Norman Leto shows the Black Sun and Kuba Bąkowski the Polaris – two navigation stars, orientation points in a trip into the unknown. Both prove equally deceiving because, as the Incredible Hulk says in another of Bąkowski’s works, ‘The question is more about not where we are as when we are’.
Stach Szabłowski