Teraz! Symposium

Panellists:

Jakub Banasiak

Łukasz Białkowski

Beata Frydryczak

Konrad Schiller

Curator:

Artur Pastuszek

Place:
Library, University of Zielona Góra

Now, That Is When?

History is a narrative. Constructed with many voices, images, memories. Invoking testimony and underpinned by a sense that the multiplicity of the events has an inner order, arranges itself into a consistent narrative, is woven around our experience and filtered through knowledge, and that we can recognize both its direction and meaning.

In European tradition, the recognition of a continuity and logical connection between the past, present, and future is fundamental for a conscious experience of time. History as knowledge is based on rationality, and rationality permits no ambivalence or chaos. In a contingent, ambiguous universe, art finds its place far more effectively than other forms of cultural activity. That is perhaps because its forms prove more successful at inhabiting collective memory; they produce images, individualized narratives, and critical discourses. It is only this way that we are able to discover how vastly wide a range of attitudes towards the past can be adopted.

Just as contemporary art and culture are preoccupied with images, so history finds its element in description, in narration constructed around the events discovered and presented. The Greek word ιστορία[1] urged one rather to inquire, referencing the human sense of observation, being synonymous with a quest for the sources of knowledge and with experimentation. However, the modern meaning of history has been reduced to regulation. It is probably possible to read a common basis, a discourse-dynamizing multiplicity, into the polyphony of history and the proliferation of images, for the reconstructions of the past and manifested strategies of seeing determine the ways in which we perceive and interpret the world around us.

In this historical setting, invoking the first major artistic event held in the so called Regained Lands, we reach back to the People’s Poland period and its end, the early 1990s [M1] . We are not interested, however, in instrumentalizing specific artworks, nor in analyzing art’s alliance with or contestation of the regime, its involvement in ideological conflicts and political projects. If we consider its politicality, it is from the perspective of the aesthetic and political power of the artistic gesture which establishes a new order of experience. Artistic practices would thus constitute an intervention in social space, but they would also be tantamount to becoming involved in history and modifying the memory bound up with it which, as a social product, has a political profile. Especially the turn of the 1980s and 1990s was a period when a new, free-market reality was shaping up: a time of transformation and reorientation, of the emergence of new aesthetic codes and visual standards, of a confrontation between the old order and the groundbreaking energy of novelty, a time when a new middle class was forming and the shortcomings of capitalism were being laid bare, when new strategies of image production and circulation were gaining currency. It was, unfortunately, also a time when art was invested with utilitarian value, but stripped of the cultural one. An economic and societal verification of its usefulness relegated artists to the role of cogwheels in the machinery of an economic plan. Knowledge, in fact, received the same treatment, though science had already been forced earlier to prove its usefulness and economic viability. Today the artist and the artwork are mere commodities in the capitalist process.

In an era forcibly colonized by “scopic power,” distorting the logic of this process destabilizes the aesthetic regime. The pandemic has radically transformed the quotidian – precarity has spilt out to all fields of social life, hitting particularly hard in the art and culture sector and disrupting the functioning of institutions, with the new situation of mistrust, distance, and isolation heightening a sense of crisis. But this “state of exception” has only intensified feelings that have accompanied us for some time, those of alienation, confinement, stagnation. All that makes us tremble has already been anticipated in art; the crisis has only released more traumatic images, exposed our hidden fears and underlying notions, enhanced our sense of a temporary and fragmentary world. Images of lockdown-emptied cities have highlighted the melancholic beauty of urban spaces. The current situation has helped us to ascertain that a state of crisis and transformation is not a state of exception, but a permanent one, and that the images that the contemporary museum of the imagination preserves will reiterate the same transitoriness, precariousness, and helplessness as before.

Now, turning towards a time when the identity of the cities on the Polish People’s Republic’s western frontier was forming anew, we seek to trace all these doubts, characteristic for transition periods. We direct our gaze towards a period of metamorphoses, of transformations occurring on various levels of the social reality, but also towards ways of seeking an antidote to the poisons of vulgarity and utilitarianism. We embrace the founding myth of Zielona Góra’s artistic community in the hope that it can translate into similar stories in other localities, that it helps us to find distance and understand our own place, even if we are aware that history cannot really teach us anything. A crisis is never a good pretext for education. In the background of the phenomena in question there looms the question of the functioning of art institutions, of systemic regulations, cultural policies, and the profiling (reinterpretation) of history in the context of structural changes.

Today, we probably experience more acutely than in the times of the Golden Grape Exhibitions and Symposiums and the New Art Biennale the contingency, temporariness, and ephemerality of our situation. Networked popular culture has become the foundation of the collective experience. We also have a greater awareness of  how dispersed power is invading the most intimate areas of life. What is the moment that we find ourselves in? How to describe the ongoing transformation? What shape will the clash between day-to-day politics and the functioning of art institutions adopt? How will artistic projects inscribe themselves in the political reality and the dominant language of power? What we have now is a constant transmutation, a state of flux, a suspension between the agreed-upon narrative and the intentionality of prognosis. An extraordinary state of ordinariness. A continuous in-between. Now is looking curiously at the past and anxiously awaiting the future.

[1] Greek historiā, knowledge obtained through inquiry.

[M1]logiczniej byłoby późnych 80-tych