Known first and foremost as a theatre director, but by no means less significant as a visual artist, Tadeusz Kantor is one of the most restless personalities of the Polish art of the last century. His human openness continuously engaged in the most diverse, and sometimes even contradictory poetic adventures. He professed that in art, everything should be mixed together, transformed and the chance impact should be sought. Those who until now have been familiar only with his visual art creations can gain a closer view on Kantor’s theatrical actionism through the present Budapest show, as the material on view concentrates on this (among others, on his 1967 initiative, Sea Panorama happening).
The creative world of the Polish artist is determined by corresponding characteristics of language and content. In the case of Kantor, one should not attempt an essential division between disciplines, as they are concerned successively with precisely the same human dilemmas – which are, in fact, self-searching, self-determinations. ”…His painting is often theatre, his theatre painting, his set design often a mixture of the two, and the whole in its entirety was a total happening”, Mariusz Hermansdorfer writes of him, and in all certainty, this approaches the truth.
It is a fact that he was already realising happenings when this artistic expression did not yet even officially exist in Europe. Later, however, he openly placed himself in opposition to the American doctrine of the happening, in an approximate answer to Kaprow’s theory of the genre, according to which in the happening, ”the themes, the materials, the actions and the relations between them could originate from any place and any era at all, with the exception of art, its derivatives and its milieu”. In contrast with Kaprow’s theory symbolising the rootlessness of the American consciousness, the spirit of the European happening instilled by Kantor is imbued by a kind of heretic repetition, which made possible the evocation and reinterpretation of already tried and tested values – for example, the works of renowned painters. He does not deny the perspective directed toward the past, but rather places already petrified conventions into a new context, in order that he may discover their values remaining hidden as a consequence of their immobility and peel from them the fake cover of veneration.
At the end of the 1950’s, during his second trip to Paris, he is struck by the winds of informel. Under the influence of the works of Fautrier, Mathieu, Pollock and Wols, he too distances himself from figurative depiction and conducts the chaos perceived around him onto formless material and movement. He also extends the creative method intrinsic to informel, the gesture of pouring and splashing, to the stage. He manipulates the actors in the same way as paints pressed out of the tube: first he stuffs them into a cupboard, then he flings them out and hangs them on a peg. And the text delivered from the stage is nothing more than gobbledygook and jabberwocky flowing asunder, such an amorphous pile of material as would undoubtedly be spurned by Márai, who in various writings considered abstraction to be dead and buried.
At the start of the 1960’s, he has his first larger-scale cycle of happenings. He focuses on the movement and action simultaneously with their manifestation in the space. At about this time, one of his most memorable exhibitions is organised in Cracow, when he crams hundreds of objects of various function into the gallery, with which he creates the first ”environment” (the term ”installation” is as of yet unknown) in Polish art. It could be said that his entire artistic oeuvre concerns the disappearance and reappearance of man. In the concluding phase of his oeuvre, he gradually settles accounts with his environs and with himself, and he paints his own death. At the same time, he also becomes possessed of similar reflections on the stage. His final direction is nothing else but the preparation for his own departure. His prophetic capacities are proven when prior to the premiere of the piece, on one of the rehearsals, he dies.
In connection with the presentation of Impossible, the eternal dilemma with regard to Kantor – and in fact to theatrical actionism, as well as to performance – arises anew: i.e., that to what extent can it be considered credible to represent an artistic ensemble/artistic process based upon action, by means of documentary photographs and video recordings? This dilemma is also propounded by Wieslaw Borowski in an interview. He first and foremost lodges a grievance that even in Kantor exhibitions installed with the greatest respect and care, it is an approach from the past, and not from the perspective of the living present, through which we view the spiritual legacy of the artist. We cannot escape this feeling in the Ludwig either, no matter how professional and suitable the installation in every aspect with regard to the complex technical challenges that the works demand.
There is one thing, nevertheless, which is infinitely captivating, and that is the black-and-white spectacle. In this case, this is not primarily a technical attribute following from a documentary nature, but rather a special – one might say specifically ‘Polish’ – spiritual motif, which alongside Kantor’s is of a determinant validity in the opuses of Jerzy Berec, Józef Szajna and the somewhat younger Józef Robakowski, among others, but is also powerfully perceptible in the mood of the early works of Wajda.