In the modern world time is the scarcest value, more so than unpolluted environment or energy supply for man can deal with those problems. However, he cannot deal with the lack of time. The modern world runs a very fast course. I would not say 'too fast'. Such is its nature which we must accept, as we do a weather forecast.
Thus the problem of time is essential for modern man and for his practical existence in the world. It has been discussed both by professionals in the culture field (Paul Vrilio has invented a specific discipline to deal with it, dromology) and by everybody in everyday life. It can be solved by radical dissociation from civilisation. One can also choose some tradition (the bill of fare is very long indeed) and identify oneself with it, which provides stability to the world. However, such methods serve rather evading the problem than solving it. Moreover, in this way one is immediately expelled to the outskirts of culture. Therefore we must deal with the problem of time if we want to exist in the modern world. This can be achieved through information, which is the essential 'energy supply'. If civilisation provides the means of disseminating information, that is media, culture helps select information and use it, as well as gives the skill to issue one's own information, that it to express oneself. Thus time brings together the user and the tool. The relationship between the two is close, so the tool is important for man and consequently, for the form of culture he creates.
The tools provided by civilisation help solve the problems of time which is objective clock time and can be measured, whereas culture solves the problems of human time, which is experienced subjectively and treated emotionally, which may flow fast or slow, be good or bad. Lack of time, the fast working of the world, which are generally typical of our epoch, eventually are the concern of individuality, as they are practised individually, also in art. Within that area there is a category of phenomena which are all time-based. On the other hand, they are individuality-based. These characteristic features of art appear to be also the characteristic features of the world today, hence such artistic phenomena or formulae can be justifiably regarded as contemporary art. Among them are various types of performance art, that is art which is par excellence concerned with the human psycho-physical condition, as well as various types of installation, that is art involved with life space and structures of temporary character, where only the appearance of a person reveals their meaning, and also obviously, the art of the electronic media. It is a huge material, still undefined, unclassified and unanalysed by art theoreticians. What they all have in common is temporality and man's central position. Yet man is not so much the source of art, as such a statement can be referred to any creative work and is not exclusively characteristic of contemporary art, but he is art itself. Thus now, years after various avant-garde movements, art implements practically one of their essential and then utopian notions: close affinity with life. Moreover, the importance of time-based art forms is emphasized by the fact that they are made of the material most precious to people now - of time. Thus common everyday life practice as experienced by contemporary people is translated into new art forms which are apposite to life and the modern world, and which enable individuality to exist through art, to be-in-the-world through being-in-art
Philosophy nowadays has ceased to be interested in being, that is in ascertaining what exists and what does not exist, and has left it to the individual to decide. Formerly the existential questions used to be the domain of metaphysics which was concerned with search for the absolute and with constructing absolute hierarchies. Questioning metaphysics has been the main project in philosophy from Nietzsche to contemporary postmodernists. In the professional thinking about man and the contemporary world, common approach and life have prevailed. The human point of view has become the point of view of philosophy. It is dominated now by hermeneutics and the philosophy of dialogue and communication which take into account variety and changeability connected with man and human life. In art, the last project for thinking through the absolute was the tautologic treatment of art problems in modernism as realised in avant-garde movements. The roots of performance art and installation, and generally of time-based art, are also there. Yet within the avant-garde movements, manifestations of such art or their portents were rare and odd, and more importantly, they resulted from regarding art as continuous search for formal novelty, which was the fundamental avant-garde creative method. Novelty is no longer the leading principle in art, while innovation is no longer, as in modernism, the end but the beginning of art; it is no longer an ideal postulate but a practical and pragmatic one. The quotation method, typical of post-modernism, is also used in art. Yet performance and installation forms are not created according to the principle of formal tautology for more fundamental reasons. The constitutive role of man in these forms of art implies their important feature which differentiates this art from art created in the tradition of modernist tautology. For this art does not refer to any other art, it does not define through form, but seeks meaning, which is its raison d'etre. True contemporary art is created according to the principle of meaning, and to the principle of form. The fabric of art today is the message, and not formal novelty, which can be post-anything. Thus time-based art, that is art of human condition, or post-modernist art, is the ground where common everyday human experience and philosophical reflection meet and surface; it is the common ground for thinking, feeling and behaviour for all of us, and for professionals in artistic thinking and creativity as well. It must be so, for life is (contemporary) art.
Witold Gombrowicz, a fierce critic of art /philosophy/ literature which was too far removed from life, that is of individuality, who made a point of not being bored by art, thus wrote in his essay 'Art and Boredom' (Teksty Drugie, 1/96): "..when a girl pins a trinket into her hair, or when we merrily talk in a cafe-we create art. Reducing this natural and common activity to the activities of a small group of people who paint pictures and write books, searching laboriously for some special raison d'etre for them, idiotic exaggeration in evaluating this procedure and its influence on the surrounding world, all this certainly is not a mark of particular depth or width of mental horizon, but just the opposite."
£ukasz Guzek
Grzegorz Borkowski
A monument of the past, the Castle at Bytow, confronted with the International Artists' Meetings which it hosts, frequently raised simple and essential questions. Why are we so interested in art created now, if there is so much art produced in the past? The 'treasury of the past' is so rich indeed that none of us would be able to assimilate it in his/her lifetime. It contains countless masterpieces, and yet we are not satisfied with them. For what we need in art is contact with a partner who lives in the present, as we do. This is at least our starting point, and it is essential. For the present, as opposed to the past, is still an open period of time, and it is real, as opposed to the future. In the artistic activity of contemporary people we seek our partner, and comprehensive dialogue concerning what is real and what still remains open. That aspect defines the emotional and mental horizon of such events as the Castle of Imagination. Irrespective of various stylistic and social orientations, by transcending the differences of artistic and national languages we communicate our sense of the reality which is not yet closed completely.
The most direct narration formula appears to be effective still. It was used this year by Pawel Kwasniewski, who defined his spectacle I have seen the Paiwan-Tsu as a report performance. His very private narrative concerned the small tribe he had met during his journey to the Far East, its culture and present living conditions. The tale about that tribe's social degradation was accompanied by his drawing and explaining the symbols essential to that culture, which cannot adjust itself to modern economic competition. At the end a recording of a solemn song of the Paiwan-Tsu people was played, supplemented by the performer's listless falling, his head striking the wall. The author referred here to his earlier performance, the quotation acquiring new meanings in this context - it became a mataphor for the frustrated expectations of some people, while also emphasizing their very personal experience of their fate.
The performance by Elvira Santamaria (Mexico), which consisted of many sequences, was concerned with indifference to violence shown in the mass media. The author had her blood taken twice in front of the audience; then she drew it into her mouth and sketched symbols with it: a cross on the newspapers spread before her, and a circular labirynth on linen. In the final part of her performance, she demonstrated, bent over newspapers, inability to speak with her mouth filled with blood. The title Reflexes Reading: Poland suggested to some in the audience various interpretations, which although close to the artist's intentions, were much more specific than she might have expected. So the use of a recording with the 'disco polo' music was understood not only as a sign for mass entertainment, but also for a specific political group. Similarly, the breaking of the mirror in which the audience had seen their faces was interpreted as disintegration of the social self-portrait, yet not in general categories, but as a result of the latest presidential election in Poland.
Erika and Joseph Juhasz (Slovakia) presented in their performance Contraversion their analysis of that notion. In the action space, limited by two vertical sheets facing each other, two figures appeared: one dressed in black, the othe dressed in white. First each of them pointed to an egg suspended on the opposite sheet - it must have signified some chosen value. Then the figures were enclosed in long seperate tunnels made of black plastic and began a slow journey crawling, each isolated from the other. While freeing themselves from this enclosure, each figure dropped to the floor an egg which must have been found during that journey. After a while the figures approached, as at the beginning, the opposite sheets, and each of them crushed the egg suspended on the sheet.
André Stitt (Northern Ireland) chose the Castle boiler-room for his performance He inhabited a mysterious place following the Almighty's shadow. The two-floor underground space was a perfect stage for two parts of his performance, each of them working through completely different emotions on two physical levels. On the lower level, Stitt's action, which consisted in shouting, the clatter of tumbling objects, splashing paint and blood from a slaughterhouse, expressed complaint, rebellion, aggresion and destruction. On the upper level, his action consisted in gruelling work, full of resignation and subdued pain, repeated in a treadmill rhythm.The vicinity in time and space of those two realities presented persuasively their mutual relations, their mutual permeation and their common source.
Wladyslaw Kazmierczak was clearly ironic when he chose the title for his performance Greenpeace. On the table he collected a small array of sentimental plastic products, on the wall was projected a (soundless) film scene showing a fight in a posh kitchen, the tape-recorder played the same pop song round and round. The author, dressed in an evening suit, looked impassively at his reflection in the mirror he was holding in his hands. Suddenly he broke it on his head and then, with a blank expression on his face, began to present music cards for special occasions. Afterwards, presenting other objects from the table, particularly plastic flowers, he began to burn them methodically, one by one, with an electric iron. When he had done all the flowers, with the same iron he began to burn its cord. As it could be expected, what followed was a short-circuit, the fuses automatically went off and electricity was cut off. Lights went out, the film and the music stopped.
Tomas Ruller (Czech Republic) in his performance For all that resorted to the open and not clearly defined language of objects in which they do not signify words but notions and attitudes. It is necessary to explain it starting from the end, by enumerating the objects used in the performance and put aside so that they formed a set of points of reference in the much ramified intellectual content of the show: 1. a red cap and stereoscopic glasses; 2. a cone of sulphur with a mercury-in-glass thermometer stuck into it (the thermometer had been used briefly to take temperature in the performer's mouth); 3. a dark jar from a chemical laboratory with a label 'philosophy and performance'; from this jar a mysterious substance was spilled out, with an interesting property - set on fire it kept changing its colour and volume and created its own small sparkling spectacle; 4. a blue blindfold and two horrifying tools: a sickle and a metal cone used in the slaughterhouse to flay pigs. The blindfolded performer, holding these two objects (like the symbol of justuce holding the scales and the sword), struck one against the other producing low metallic sounds; 5. an empty champaigne bottle and a glass into which all of the bottle's contents had been poured, and naturally, the glass could not hold it so it cascaded onto the floor. The performer drank the amount of wine which the glass he had used held, and not the amount in the bottle.
Wojciech Kowalczyk (Poland) presented briefly his concept of the artistic practice called ALO-art as well as some activities based on it. He variously used in them the absurd effect of the literal expression through action of the semantic content of some objects, records or concepts. In the first episode Kowalczyk presented three gramophone records with the Polish national anthem, a religious song and an old popular song. He hanged the records vertically on the wall, then in turn he simulated their being played, singing and making spiral movements with his head on the records. He 'played' the anthem standing at attention, and the religious song, on his knees. Young people in the audience resposponded to those actions with spontaneous mirth, as they perceived first of all humour involved in the absurd situations. Absurdity, however, contains also the element which by revealing steoretypical associations makes the way for new ones.
Gianni Placentini (Italy) charmingly combined the direct and subtle expression with the reference to thinking based on ample erudition. In his activity A family scene and other icons he demonstrated contemporary packaging and labels (mainly for children's cosmetics) and interpreted them as if they portrayed the Holy Family. He continued his narrative walking together with the public round two castle rooms. He distributed mushy labels as if they were holy pictures. Gravely and smoothly he proceeded to lecturing. In his lecture 'The Present of the Universe' delivered in English he emphasized two meanings of the word 'present' in English: 1. inherent, present-day, 2. a gift. The lecture was concerned with both the notion of the present of the Universe and the possibility of giving away the Universe as a gift (together with its present). The conceptual solutions were combined here in a natural way with statements which appealed simply to common sense.
In this year's programme of the Castle of Imagination were well represented various activities which transcended beyond music comprehended in the traditional sense and employed sound as their essential component.
Waldemar Bochniarz (Poland) appeared on the sun-swept castle court loaded with colourful beach equipment and carrying a saxophone. His performance Holiday yogurt began with the 'shots' produced by piercing bottles with fizzy drinks. Then the saxophone was activated, not to generate sounds defined by music rules, but to describe its own inner and changeable space. Streams of blown-in air indicated, through whistling, murmuring and grunting, the spacial complexity of the instrument's interior, they created a sound sculpture constructed of air in motion. The differently manifested creative function of air was humorously emphasized at the end of the show by blowing air into beach gadgets, which also became - as three-dimentional objects - a sort of sculpture.
Bartolome Ferrando (Spain) presented three short performances of acoustic poetry. In A hot dog, words, repeated with changing intonation and expression, became liberated from the meanings assigned to them by linguistic practice and functioned as autonomous acoustic facts. Numbers, a sequence of numbers: 10, 100, 1000 and up to a million, was declaimed with increasing affectation. Its grotesque effect was more evident as a visual record of the numbers was provided by adding successive eggs (functioning as noughts) to the digit 1 drawn on a sheet of paper. At the end all eggs were broken into a frying-pan. In memorian Fluxus featured the author boisterously playing on the miniature toy piano (employing a hammer in the final phase), which ended in smashing the instrument to pieces. Then the author, ceremoniously and courteously, handed out the remnats of the instrument to the audience.
Another, older tradition of vocal poetry was demonstrated by Giovanni Fontana (Italy) in A futuristic party, composed of twelve poems written in the years 1910-1934. He presented, with subtle simplicity, poetry based on sounds articulated by the performer; it included the works of: F.T. Marinetti, U. Boccioni, F. Depera, A. Lalazzeschi, G. Balla, F. Cangiullo, C. Carra. Apart from onomatopoeic poems, he rendered those which, in a varying degree, employed elements of enacted situations which required suitable acting skills. Fontana managed to integrate the theatrical elements into his performance, to function as quotations. He used artistic means based in the futuristic tradition as components of his contemporary performance. This poetic banquet culminated in Dinner with fruit composed of poems by Fontana and F. Cavallo. Special flavour was supplied to it by a sentence spoken in Polish: poetry is original sin.
In their two performances, acting together Jens Brand and Waldo Riedl (Germany) used the electronic equipment they had designed themselves. 1. Sensors and matches. Four persons were seated at a table and each of them carefully constructed a structure made of matchsticks which were heaped in the middle of the table, until one of the structures collapsed. In the silence resulting from concentration, sensors picked out faint sounds which signalized the noiseless movement of the matchsticks. 2. The microphones placed in the performers' shoes transmitted the sounds made during their free and cheerful running round castle rooms. They dissappeared and reappeared, but they could be heard all the time, better or worse. Finally, they produced sound activity using a vacuum cleaner which made the strings of the piano vibrate.
In Brand's solo performance A table, tumblers and glasses were arranged on a table which was made to vibrate by a generator controlled by a portable computer. Thus produced vibrations could not be seen but could be heard, for they set the glasses in motion and made them tinkle as they moved to the edge of the table. Sound was treated there as a carrier and symptom of kinetic energy.
Of a different character was Technopera, a long night Techno Party held at Jelen Lake in Bytow by the Gdansk group called C.U.K.T. (Central Office for Technological Culture): Piotr Wyrzykowski, Robert Jurkowski, Jacek Niegoda, Rafal Grabowski (Polska). Directed live, it handled image, text and particularly sound by means of computer technology, and thus realized fascination with techno aesthetics as a popular medium of communicating energy between people and between man and the machine.
Different aspects of music culture were used in the performance by Iliana Alvarado and Marcin Krzyzanowski (Poland). Three simultaneous activities stimulated searching for realations between three heterogeneous conventions of artistic expression. Appearing as guest performer, Pawel Konnak (Gdansk) , seated at the piano, read a long lecture on the history of the concept of the music score. Aside, Alvarado, wearing a classical ballet outfit, slowly made movements around the chair, which resembled ballet figures. Krzyzanowski, inspired and sincere, sang a monotonous song without words, dropping stones into a metal vessel at irregular intervals.
Tanya Ury (Germany) presented to the audience, to be experienced individually through headphones, her performance of virtual sound based on a spoken text entitled Playing with the ear. Jürgen Kisters wrote about this production: 'Not open, rather one should shut one's eyes in the case of the art of Tanya Ury at the Artillerie exhibition space. Prior to this one will have already put on headphones and turned the walkman on. For the play is played back aurally and is a mixture of radio play, language course, relaxation therapy and art collage rollercoaster. The talk is about the risks of hypnotic effects while car driving, the meditative worlds of sunbathing and the difficulties of lying in the learning of words. The clear voice flow of the artist (in English) drives the virtual sound realities through the imagination like peas tumbling over steps.'
Video presentations this year included the documentation of the events at the previous meetings of the Castle of Imagination and two individual presentations.
Piotr Wyrzykowski (Poland) in Look at me showed a rigorously consistent production which integrated an image of the human body with the internal code of computer data visualization.
Ray Langenbach (Singapore) in Kisses on all varnishing-days presented an account of a performance whose author, hidden behind a curtain (the audience could see his shadow only), talked about the homosexual community, while the hi-tech equipment added to it an image of the sound wave amplitude relating to some words in his utterance and projected those key words on a screen.
The presentations at the Castle were accompanied by the exhibition of drawings, letters and a video film by Marcos Kurtycz (Mexico), the artist who had been invited to Bytow but died unexpectedly. His art was focused on the magic idea of the serpent man. The sculptor Hitoshi Kimura (Japan) installed in the window of one of the castle towers a small three-dimensional object which resembled a mysterious vessel and which was a metaphor for humility.
The regular and the youngest participant of the Meetings, the thirteen-year-old Sewer Hrehorowicz (Bytow), together with a colleague of the same age, presented in the cellar a short show on raising ghosts with electronic equipment.
In each annual presentation of the Castle of Imagination a different component begins unexpectedly to dominate and becomes a major factor, often independently of the programme. In 1995 the surprsisingly numerous young, or even child audience (as the Meeting took place during the school year) became over-excited and often unmanageable. Such a festive mood gave an extra stimulus to some activities, but was a difficult test to some other ones. Back in 1994 it turned out that many activities needed more time than expected, and therefore the programme became more intensive and packed. Some shows seemed to overflow into the next ones. I heard a couple of times from the participants that the three-day-long Meeting had become a sort of a collective work, one collective production in which all artists participated. This year, at the fourth Meeting, what was revealed was the complexity of our relationship with the building itself, the Castle at Bytow. For four days the Castle was dominated by presentations of contemporary art; it absorbed our energy but simultaneously we could sense that our presence there was only a tiny fraction of time in the Castle history. Perhaps such a perception became keener as the town of Bytow celebrated its 650 anniversary this year. The historic building opened up its space for us to appear there, to meet and express our ideas. Then we collected our things, experiences and conversations, and departed. The artists, the audience and the organizers were equally guests at the Castle. This common factor, this momentary character of the event, resulted this year in a stronger need to emphasize the community spirit among the artists and the audience, however brief. It coincided with the intentions of some artists who had suggested the necessity for a wider range of phenomena to be presented at the Castle of Imagination.
The above mentioned C.U.K.T. group started an action, approved by the local government in Bytow, which consisted in unpaid manual work on public projects during the Meeting. The volunteers from Gdansk were busy renovating the building of the Sports and Recreation Centre in Bytow, working together with local workers for eight hours a day. They reported on their work for the town at the final conference of the Meeting. They also initiated an unorthodox questionnaire given to the participants in the Meeting (both the artists and the audience), in which they attempted to probe the spiritual identity of the respondents.
Tomas Ruller and Gianni Piacentini interacted with the audience in a different way. They called it initiation and entitled The Wise. It preceded other presentations on one evening. They ushered groups of several persons at a time to a room with a large number of antlers displayed on the walls. The persons were then placed separately, their heads touching the bottom part of the antlers.. The authors asked everybody to freeze in that position, to suppress emotions and to concentrate. Then the group was led to the next room where they waited for the other participants in the initiation. When the whole audience had proceeded to the other room, performances began.
Grzegorz Borkowski interacted with the audience during the whole duration of the event. He distributed small stick-on badges which read I see it as well. People displayed that message on their clothes, which referred both to the artistic and the other events at the Meeting. Moreover, he photographed the audience at performances, using a flash lamp, which emphasized their presence as an essential component of the art situation.
Jan Pieniazek (Poland) produced an istallation which was activated by the audience. In a large darkened room a vast constellation of lighting points and a microphone on a stand were visible. The voices of the audience directed to the microphone switched on at random various programmes which generated electronic sounds and the movement of the laser beam reflected by a set of numerous small mirrors. This produced an effect of the changing dimensions of the room.
At the entrace to the Castle functioned the interactive installation by Zbigniew Kupisz. When anybody approached a timber kennel, in its round opening a dog's eyes appeared, and then its barking snout. The animated computer graphics was simple and clear. The loud barking was heard repeatedly in the Castle, and gradually it became a familiar sound. It might be heard there even now.
Translated by Jadwiga Piatkowska