{"id":400043,"date":"2001-11-04T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-11-04T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/?p=400043"},"modified":"2001-11-04T23:00:00","modified_gmt":"2001-11-04T23:00:00","slug":"kantor-a-strandon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/kritika\/kantor-a-strandon\/","title":{"rendered":"Kantor on the Beach"},"content":{"rendered":"
\r\n\r\n\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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\r\nrestless personalities of the Polish art of the last century. His human openness continuously engaged in the most diverse, and sometimes\r\neven contradictory poetic adventures. He professed that in art, everything should be mixed together, transformed and the chance impact\r\nshould be sought. Those who until now have been familiar only with his visual art creations can gain a closer view on Kantor’s theatrical\r\nactionism through the present Budapest show, as the material on view concentrates on this (among others, on his 1967 initiative, Sea\r\nPanorama happening<\/i>).<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The creative world of the Polish artist is determined by corresponding characteristics of language and content. In the case of Kantor,\r\none should not attempt an essential division between disciplines, as they are concerned successively with precisely the same human\r\ndilemmas – which are, in fact, self-searching, self-determinations. \u201d…His painting is often theatre, his theatre painting, his set design\r\noften a mixture of the two, and the whole in its entirety was a total happening\u201d, Mariusz Hermansdorfer writes of him, and in all certainty,\r\nthis approaches the truth.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

It is a fact that he was already realising happenings when this artistic expression did not yet even officially exist in Europe. Later,\r\nhowever, he openly placed himself in opposition to the American doctrine of the happening, in an approximate answer to Kaprow’s theory\r\nof the genre, according to which in the happening, \u201dthe themes, the materials, the actions and the relations between them could originate\r\nfrom any place and any era at all, with the exception of art, its derivatives and its milieu\u201d. In contrast with Kaprow’s theory symbolising the\r\nrootlessness of the American consciousness, the spirit of the European happening instilled by Kantor is imbued by a kind of heretic\r\nrepetition, which made possible the evocation and reinterpretation of already tried and tested values – for example, the works of renowned\r\npainters. He does not deny the perspective directed toward the past, but rather places already petrified conventions into a new context, in\r\norder that he may discover their values remaining hidden as a consequence of their immobility and peel from them the fake cover of\r\nveneration.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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\r\nFautrier, Mathieu, Pollock and Wols, he too distances himself from figurative depiction and conducts the chaos perceived around him onto\r\nformless material and movement. He also extends the creative method intrinsic to informel, the gesture of pouring and splashing, to the\r\nstage. 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\r\nthem out and hangs them on a peg. And the text delivered from the stage is nothing more than gobbledygook and jabberwocky flowing\r\nasunder, such an amorphous pile of material as would undoubtedly be spurned by M\u00e1rai, who in various writings considered abstraction to\r\nbe dead and buried.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

At the start of the 1960’s, he has his first larger-scale cycle of happenings. He focuses on the movement and action simultaneously\r\nwith their manifestation in the space. At about this time, one of his most memorable exhibitions is organised in Cracow, when he crams\r\nhundreds of objects of various function into the gallery, with which he creates the first \u201denvironment\u201d (the term \u201dinstallation\u201d is as of yet\r\nunknown) in Polish art. It could be said that his entire artistic oeuvre concerns the disappearance and reappearance of man. In the\r\nconcluding phase of his oeuvre, he gradually settles accounts with his environs and with himself, and he paints his own death. At the same\r\ntime, he also becomes possessed of similar reflections on the stage. His final direction is nothing else but the preparation for his own\r\ndeparture. His prophetic capacities are proven when prior to the premiere of the piece, on one of the rehearsals, he dies.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

In connection with the presentation of Impossible, <\/i>the eternal dilemma with regard to Kantor – and in fact to theatrical\r\nactionism, as well as to performance – arises anew: i.e., that to what extent can it be considered credible to represent an artistic\r\nensemble\/artistic process based upon action, by means of documentary photographs and video recordings? This dilemma is also\r\npropounded by Wieslaw Borowski in an interview. He first and foremost lodges a grievance that even in Kantor exhibitions installed with\r\nthe greatest respect and care, it is an approach from the past, and not from the perspective of the living present, through which we view\r\nthe spiritual legacy of the artist. We cannot escape this feeling in the Ludwig either, no matter how professional and suitable the\r\ninstallation in every aspect with regard to the complex technical challenges that the works demand.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

There is one thing, nevertheless, which is infinitely captivating, and that is the black-and-white spectacle. In this case, this is not\r\nprimarily a technical attribute following from a documentary nature, but rather a special – one might say specifically ‘Polish’ – spiritual\r\nmotif, which alongside Kantor’s is of a determinant validity in the opuses of Jerzy Berec, J\u00f3zef Szajna and the somewhat younger J\u00f3zef\r\nRobakowski, among others, but is also powerfully perceptible in the mood of the early works of Wajda.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":630043,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kritika"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}