Castle Five.
The international 'Castle of Imagination' in Bytow has already built its short history. 5 years, 150 artists from 23 countries. The only cyclical live art festival in Poland. Mainly performance art. Yet, each edition of the festival is unique. Different artists, different art, different ideas. Different audience reactions. The festival is one of the few meetings of performance artists in the world.
Some of the invited artists brought to our attention the absurd, the dangerous, and the degenerate. The dismal catalogue seems to continue ad infinitum. Others, regardless of this world's evil, engage in a careless play in a broad sense of the word. The third trend, an extremely important one, is artists' focus on themselves, mental and creative energy processes which are rooted in human beings. The limitation connected with gender, skin colour or living in a big city. Ageing, watching the passing of time. The artists who place art in a broader social, philosophical or religious context take an entirely different stance. This temporarily assumed diversity of attitudes is not a permanent regularity, the more so that the issues very often coalesce or permeate each other.
Let us try to trace what ideas and issues which were presented during this year's edition of the Bytow festival.
Wladyslaw Kazmierczak's performance "Towards a Better Future" was a bitter sneer at the purity of intention in politics. The recurrence of empty gestures and slogans; sham brilliance, everything done for show; "human" behaviour of politicians reduced to poster rules; falsity of interpersonal relations; rendering all values banal. And aspirations to create a future for the world.
Jan Swidzinski / Poland, in his presentation entitled "The Polish Ways", touched upon the perpetual act of building the Polish home, each time anew and ever unsuccessfully. The left hand to the left, the right hand to the right. And what if an artificial hand, neither left nor right, enters the stage? What will happen if, instead of the white-and-red cards (the ones houses are built of), beautiful chalices with colourful pieces of crystal glass + beautiful flowers are placed on the table?
Lukasz Napolski / Poland - in his performance "Instant" focused on the possibilities lying in the modern technologies which offer many a thing in a single pill. Energy, happiness, health, knowledge. As the artist has ventured to prepare 'Lukasz Napolski Instant', we face a real threat of cloning human beings. The artist makes us aware of the popular penchant for using various 'instant' forms. In the final experiment Napolski states that he himself is more important than art, at least the art of the Louvre collection. The instant sort of art.
Pia Lindman / Finland - "I Don't Want to give You the opportunity of pretending to listen to me, so I say nothing at all', said Gundrum Esslin in Court charged with murder and arson". This lengthy title is an indirect announcement of an important issue, namely, women involvement in terrorist activities. Pia Lindman poses a question of how come a woman is capable of taking others' lives. The performance was based on a deep study on this issue. Prison confessions of an Irish woman terrorist constituted the performance's framework: the woman started to kill due to the all-embracing women's tedium.
Anna Seagrave / Ireland - gave two presentations "Grows Her Own Standing" and "Connecting The Death To The Life". The first outstandingly aesthetic performance presented the relationship between a rhythmical recurrence of a few simple gestures to the reiterating sounds of music and an unending psycho-physical process of self-creation: immersion into one's own body which verges on insanity. Bringing oneself into this absurd trance results solely from the helplessness in facing the outer world. The second performance was, in a way, a continuation of this idea. A more expressive one, yet no less dramatic. The fear of leaving behind oneself no more than a portrait on the wall is familiar to all of us.
'Sin Sin' / Ireland - a screening of a video film / computer animation. 'Sin Sin' is a group of Dublin-based artists producing anarchist music. The video film was a collage of well-known banal images from American class B films. Dance, screen lovers' kisses, boxing competitions, strongmen, freaks, politicians + insets of drawing and painting. Repeated dozens of times in numerous constellations. A self-made soundtrack accompanied the images. Yet, we will never know whether it was an affectionate sarcasm or an act of depreciation and rejection of the tender and trivial version of American culture.
Jens Brand & Waldo Riedl / Germany - "A Temporary Answer to a Common Unanswered Question". The artists adopted an entirely different strategy, namely that of a joke. The question was, what was first, an egg or a hen? The performance proved it was the hen. Brand & Reidl seemingly establish an interaction with the audience and call their presentations performances. Yet, the course of each presentation, neutral and minimalist, was planned in advance. The second action, "Easy Listening", followed equally simple guidelines. The artists distributed earplugs and asked the viewers to insert them. They recorded the sounds emitted by the 'deaf' audience and then played them.
Oscar McLennan / Ireland - "Notes on Noise". Written by the author, the text for this presentation presents a critique and merciless sneer at living conditions of the modern civilisation. Consumerism, foolish advertising, living in big cities, a fair of empty ideas. A clash of culture, religion and customs with equally silly everyday life. And here a question emerges, what are the values cherished by contemporary societies? Simplifying it all, we can risk saying that the world strives for a great stabilisation. For opulence and voluminous consumption at the cost of passing over the world's convulsions and disasters in silence. Small wonder the contemporary world has rejected the convention of 'the struggling artist', an artist-provocateur, an artist asking difficult questions of the audience.
Sakkiko Yamaoka / Japan - "Practice for Patience and Flying Down". The ostensibly simple construction of the performance involved several semantic structures. The title itself explained the performance's idea, clearly taking its roots from the Japanese culture. Yet, subconsciously we could detect supplementary statements. For instance, a declaration that the state of descending/falling has some beauty to it. Or, that our affectionate attitude to nature does not reflect our attitude towards to other people.
Fumiko Takahashi / Japan - "Without Wings". Although the underlying idea of this performance was very clear (ecology), the story itself was subtle, intimate, and very beautiful.
Amanda Dunsmore / Northern Ireland - "Consuming Politics". Dunsmore's presentation was equally simple and suggestive. Two monitors displayed two different TV news programmes from Belfast. Two different worlds. Different information. No factual convergence. Even the weather was slightly different.
Istvan Kovacs / Hungary - "Re-Generation". The title of this outstanding performance can be explained in many different ways. Revival, regeneration. Another generation. Covered with an unusual dome and a piece of white cloth, Kovacs grew to transform into a black cocoon. Taking the latter off, he became a naked man. Then he disappeared behind a wall, or, to be more exact, in a tiny window, and appeared again with a huge bean plant he had grown in a pot coming out of his mouth. He created an incubator lit with a simple bulb.
Hong O-Bong / Korea - "The Bird and Me". This complex and beautiful performance was the artist's intimate story of his attitude to the bird. To birds, nature, freedom, creative activity. And to everyday, dramatic reality.
Jozsef R. Juhasz / Slovakia - "An Exercise in Communication". Here, again the idea seems to be clear. Juhasz, with a host of headphones fastened to his crash helmet, uttered the international word 'hallo'. There was no answer to the loud and articulate 'hallo'. An interactive joke.
Pawel Kwasniewski / Poland - "Belfastation #2". It was a story of Kwasniewski's visit to Belfast in March this year. The realities of a fortress town. Distrust, divisions and, finally, a bomb attack. A crime in the vicinity. Kwasniewski asks himself a question: Why not me? Why wasn't I killed?
Phill Niblock / USA - Belgium - "Untitled". Phill Niblock is an unusual artist. A legend of New York. A multimedia artist. He has been presenting similar works for 20 years. Two or three films were screened simultaneously. They presented images of physical work taking place in Asia, Africa, and Australia. Somewhere far away. And one loud, sharp noise. The message seems to be clear. The only valuable thing is human work.
Jan Pieniazek / Poland - Object 'P' + Object 'R'. Pieniazek's objects are always simple and surprising. Object 'R' is an old radio receiver with a built-in sensor. The radio responded to human steps with a silent 'Hallo'. Object 'P' is vibrating membrane with a Ping-Pong ball bouncing on its surface.
Andrzej Urbanski / Poland - an object. A TV monitor with cement bricks around it. The screen displays the same picture in three-minute sequences. Annihilation of the message. The freezing of a rather undefined reality.
Grzegorz Borkowski / Poland - "Change" - a visual text. Grzegorz Borkowski wrote CHANGE OF LOCAL TIME on the walls of one of the castle's staircases. In yet another part of the castle, he exhibited photographs of last year's 'Imagination Castle'. They presented artists as well as the audience. The shift in time yielded an intriguing effect, specially for those viewers who recognised themselves in the pictures.
Kees Mol / Holland - "Amended-Amendoes". At the beginning of his performace the artist presented slides from Jerusalem and its surroundings. The motif of travel, religious symbols, a Buddhist rosary, two live pigeons, wild flower petals spilled in a bath of water into which a burning book was thrown. A Jewish skullcap put on the head was a peculiar supplement to a secular ecumenical ritual. A unity of beauty, tradition, beliefs, and love.
Waldemar Bochniarz / Poland - "The Resonant White". A musical performance presenting the relation between sound, represented by the sounds produced by the artist, and a colour - the white. Seeking links, borders, and their mutual permeation.
Marek Choloniewski / Poland - "Lighting" was an attempt at taming the virtual space with the use of optic sensors. The artist's movements are changed directly into sound structures. The other work, "Doubles", was based on the idea of material, stylistic and formal pluralism. The composer-performer made use of various ways of changing thermal energy into sound energy. To achieve this he applied a light baton and an original optical installation fastened to his face. The lamp movement interactively conducted the score saved in a computer memory. Both pieces displayed elements of performance and computer music created 'live'.
Roney Frazer-Munro / Great Britain - "The Vampire Club". Roney Fazer-Munro is a black artist from London. His performance constituted a protest against racism. A subtle and silent protest. The artist's question was a question about our great Christian tradition with the sign of cross as its main symbol. The sign of love and sacrifice. The sign which is also identified as the symbol of racist fight. Contemporary societies take pride in their tolerance towards a variety of sexual and social deviations, transient fashions of different lifestyles. Why do these societies find it so difficult to accept people whose skin colour is different? Why can't these societies easily accept ordinary people who represent the same values, tradition, and culture?
Wladyslaw Kazmierczak
Translated by Katarzyna Buczak
Structural Mis-understanding.
Performance art is based on psycho-physical condition of the human being - this is probably the most concise definition of this kind of artistic activity. Having accepted this definition we face consequences concerning both performance art and the human being, that is the artist choosing this particular artistic road.
One of the artistic consequences is the necessity to recognise the human condition as the model for art. From this perspective art loses its object-like qualities. In return, it gains such human qualities as being transient, ever-changing and versatile as well as contradictory. Its openness borders on self-denial, its freedom verges on self-destruction.
The human being, an individual ego, which is a complex mixture of species-specific qualities and spiritual history together with the accumulation of splinters of intellectual heritage and personal thoughts, feelings, phobias, and experience constitute material for such art.
In life nothing remains static, everlasting, absolute, one-dimensional and colourless. Performance art adopts the features of life. Life is the source of performance's structural features and formal features of particular realisations.
The necessity of acting in compliance with a peculiar ethics and adhering to a certain road in everyday life is a human consequence. The same, however, could be said of any artist active in any artistic field. Yet, in other disciplines individualised characteristics of a personality make up the decisive set of factors, while in performance they result from the specificity of art itself. Performance art emerges at the point of contact between art and life, which bears consequences for both art and life. A performer has to be subversive in life and in artistic activity; sometimes it is necessary to reject the accepted norms of living in a community, or of co-existence with the family and relatives and sometimes it is necessary to take a relativistic view of the generally accepted moral values. The aforementioned features of performance art force performers into a way of life which, in turn, inspires art. It is a process of constant mutual creation. Artistic facts cannot be separated from real-life conduct. Either life and art co-mingle in acts of mutual provocation or there is no art. This fight is certified in performers' biographies.
This multifaceted relation between art and life lies at the core of performance art. This makes artists who are normally active in other fields reach for performance and other live art forms. That is why people who took their diplomas form art schools eagerly resort to performance art: it is the most direct means of artistic expression and a useful tool for opening a dialogue with the world. On the other hand, performance is not taught in art schools and due to this performers owe nothing to traditional academic education. Life itself and other performers' achievements are their masters. Performance is a genuinely democratic kind of art. Performance's freshness and intellectual vitality stem from its genetic liberalism and openness. They will not let performance art become fossilised and self-duplicating, which happened to meritorious avant-garde groups.
Accepting this definition of performance art opens a new perspective of thinking about art in general. It also shows the avenues to re-definition and a new explanation of art's role in contemporary culture. It can also help art to recover its importance and prestige, which were lost after they had been reduced to visual art, especially painting, sculpture and design, these deliverers of aesthetic objects used for interior decoration. Only when modelled by life and based on the psycho-physical condition of humans can art find its place in the modern world which has been abandoned by the absolute and is therefore deprived of any solid foundations. I do not intend to complain about contemporary times: such an attitude would lead to artistic conservatism and idealising the past, which is always a threat to the clarity of thought and assessment. On the contrary, I tend to consider relativism, changeability and transience (which could be described as a virtual character of things, facts, thoughts and emotions) to be an extremely important feature which gives birth to creativity. The lability of performance's structures matches this world and thanks to this feature we can find our place in the world and describe it. Lability is also a tool which enables us to enter into a game with the world and to answer the world's questions. We can manipulate the world creatively. That is why defining performance art is tantamount to defining contemporary art. The artist, or the human being identical with art, is the basic component of the definition.
Performance art shows a great variety of forms. One can say that there are as many performance styles as there are performers. Therefore, this kind of art is strongly individualised. Obviously, analysing many presentations, one can determine some typical trains of thoughts and ways of constructing the form. Yet, performance involves primarily the personality and mind of the artist and these two influence the character of particular presentations and the choice of the repertoire of meanings and messages. Performance's egocentricity inevitably implies its controversial status, the latter resulting from the critical distance to both existing reality and the generally accepted ethical code, that is the etiquette followed in 'good' or noble artistic circles. Mis-understanding, this lack of understanding from the world, is an intrinsic feature of performance art. Controversialism is a postulate of performers' artistic ethics, and performance as such can be called ethical art.
The postulate of rendering the surrounding world anarchistic through art is no novelty. It was a standard theoretical tool of all avant-garde movements and the main principle by which they acted. Performance's egocentricity changes the emphasis within this sound principle. The performer does not act in the name of some abstract artistic ideals or in the name of a future society. Acting by himself he builds his own living space. Controversialism is not a theoretical assumption from above, but an inner ethical obligation.
An ethical approach to performance art makes controversialism the most important and necessary element of the definition of artist. Perceived dynamically and based on the human condition, live art is anthorpologised. The artist is a work of art. The artist is the definition of art. The controversial character of performance art constitutes the most fundamental feature of contemporary art.
Łukasz Guzek
Translated by Katarzyna Buczak