The collier Ibupron

Looking at the huge murals overlapping each other like some colourful tracing papers enveloping the grey apartment blocks on Dudziarska brings to mind the final scene of that story "Two poor Rumanians speaking polish". Towards the end of the drug and alcohol adventures of the title's two protagonists on the roads and wilds of "Poland B", they arrive at a Werter type denouement, followed by a moment that is key to the whole work. The collier Ibupron proudly sails into a snow-covered forest glade. This monumental ship, slowly appearing from behind the stage props of reality, breaks up the whole performance. From a plot balancing on a fine line between the real and the absurd, we are thrown in at the deep end of a surrealistic pool, to be just a moment later smacked in the face with reality.

The juxtaposition of worlds apart, the playing with convention and creation of situations eluding simplification is a characteristic strategy of Grzegorz Drozd. In the UNIVERSAL project, art adopts the role of a tool, with which the artist discloses a new dimension of reality. The constructed chain of events leads us to confrontations between avant-garde artists and the commonplace of a housing estate. The plurality of plots entwined with this chain provokes us to explore successive and ever more engaging levels of a situation played out in a grey backwater of Warsaw, somewhere between a refuse incinerator plant and a railway line, "in Poland, i.e. nowhere".

Strolling the streets of the capital, regardless of whether it's the Old Town, the Wola district or Southern Praga, I'm constantly bombarded by the impression of treading on the ashes of a utopia. Prospects and plans pass beneath my feet and I observe stunted ideas encased by walls and closed in by architectural order. The miscarried completion of a hopeless plan, the chaotic filling of empty spaces with ideas for a society made up of the equal and those more equal than others. Dudziarska is the perfect example of a concept gone wrong, one that no doubt conceals private agendas. Far be it for me to speculate who is responsible for this brilliant plan to create a mini ghetto on Warsaw's outskirts. But it's easy to see that it fully reflects a familiar strategy of shoving problems into the background, sweeping them under a carpet that with time bulges and becomes deformed, emphasizing an existing problem even more.

I see the repetition of simple geometrical forms on the walls of these small blocks with their smashed windows as a perverse test of the avant-garde. Mondrians and Maleviches on the one hand dominate these concrete planes, but on the other hand are completely helpless. Without the history of European painting, without museum walls and their characteristic stale atmosphere, these images shine out like some naked, tragicomic giants put on display to be preyed upon by the natives with their lewd comments. Why then, I wonder, reproduce sequences of colours and shapes reminiscent of the beginning of the 20th century? Why bother to reproduce them on a huge scale, if nobody is delighted by the effect? Why expose high art to such a confrontation risking it being laughed at?

"Great poetry, being great and being poetry, cannot fail to delight us, and so it delights."

And one is tempted to shout at the foul-mouthed residents of the estate: "Malevich was a great painter!". No doubt that would provoke empty laughter sealing the border between our world and theirs.

This project is by all measures one of educational value. And by no means do I intend to educate the Dudziarska residents by familiarizing them with a canon of 20th century painting. Drozd creates an uncomfortable situation, in which like Gombrowicz in the quoted "Ferdydurka", confronts us, we who know this canon, with the question "Why does it delight us?". Why do we treat the avant-garde with such a large dose of apparent acceptance? Don't we perhaps bow to it too fervently, nodding our heads and learning by heart about the greatest revolutions in the history of art? The advance guard of art raised on the walls of these apartment blocks crashes against a wall of incomprehension, providing a pretext for auto-reflection.

This mechanism, as applied by Drozd, of creating a workaday performance of atypical situations, is to be found in the recently completed project "Letters to a brother". At about midday on June 27th, a plane appeared above the sleepy Old Town and let loose thousands of spiralling letters written by male and female prisoners from all over Poland. In the air space above Krakow, filled with visual messages of varied hue, appeared an extremely strong and popular element that grabbed the attention of thousands. It contained the stories of people deprived of any contact with the outside world. This channel of information connected that mute crowd with tourists and the town's residents. The artist took up a position apart from the communication process, granting the prisoners the status of messengers and us the status of the message's recipients. This rain of letters falling, it's worth noting, from a clear cloudless sky, brought to mind the manna of the Bible - an announcement from another world.

"Letters to a brother" was one of the main plots of the FEST? panel about art and impossible communication, which was aimed at creating, within the framework of the Art Boom Tauron Festival, space in which to reflect on the actual presence of art in public spaces. The area of the city in this case was seen as a space for simplified and aggressive visual messages absorbing our attention to a considerable degree. Can a work of art emerging in this plane, attempt to regain this attention, and if so, what language should the artist use when competing with the mass media? The inspiration for undertaking these media science deliberations was Mieczysław Porębski's book "Art and information", in which the author put on a show of amazing erudition, mixing humanistic notions with hard facts in the form of graphs and figures.

Marshall McLuhan characterized a work of art as an incomplete message, one that is not subject to the dictates of functionality, one that avoids the obvious. Art exists at the limits of communication codes and channels. It is not subject to the strict rules of communication, a finish line - a message that stretches the limits of traditional communication. This lack of the obvious very often however equals a lack of interest on the part of the recipient. Ephemeral works in public spaces are for the majority of residents silent objects, noticed by only a small group of fanatics. Where in that case is the, so often emphasized in the case of art in public spaces, general accessibility and lack of barriers between a work and its recipients?

So how should one construct a work that as McLuhan writes, permits the spectator to enter into the communication process? To not only become a part of it, but following the artist's suggestion, fill the gap that is written into it? The "Letters to a brother" project may be read as a somewhat perverse answer to that question. Drozd in this case avoided superfluous deliberation, launching a monumental performance, whose recipients involuntarily became the estate's residents.

It's exceptionally difficult to put on the mental map of a typical Cracovian a point equipped with the description a work of modern art. The for many years traditional structure of a city manifests itself on a scale of 1:1 in the attitudes of residents to this type of initiative (a living sort of Sunday after-church nap). Nostalgic dreams about the power of art winning the attention of the masses became a reality for me when, flying over the city in which I was born and brought up, I observed the falling clouds of letters. Disregarding the fact that the project opened up before the residents a different world hiding behind the words written by the prisoners, this was a performance involving form. It was a surprising and hypnotizing event, following which one could no longer look at the city of Krakow in the same way.

Because it was precisely all about looking. About looking and searching. "The eye looks for something that is further away somewhere" as Maria Poprzęcka writes. But the artist, by building up a specific situation hints about the direction in which we should look. He leads us towards that which is not evident.

The UNIVERSAL project may be for Warsaw residents what for Cracovians was the appearance of an intruder in the sky in the form of an airplane dropping letters. Both in the case of the letter drop over Krakow and the reproduction of classic works of the avant-garde on the apartment blocks, Drozd, using a monumental scale, takes us towards the surreal. The path to the surreal does not lead us by empty games with formal measures, because such means have their limits, which are not foreseen by surrealism in its strictest sense. Nor is this the result of a rejection of realism. For Drozd, reality is neither too tiring nor banal. It's an unending source of inspiration, a puzzle that is only waiting for the artist to spread it out in its original parts and then put it back together again. The missing or shift of any individual element results in this case in a series of changes, small revolutions transforming our perspective for ever.

The dot over the "i" of this project is the film entitled "Substitute label". The well-known voice of Tomasz Knapik leads us around the delicately constructed, standard housing estate on Dudziarska. Drozd paints an unreal image of this place. In order to create it, the artist became a total director, preparing not only the film but also the text and music. The painterly hand of its creator is visible in the production. Carefully selected shots and precisely edited frames in slow motion proceed one after another, mixing with the soundtrack consisting of 10 works. The narrator spins his incomplete quasi-documentary message, sprinkled with the technical terms of the modernists' manifestoes. He plays with the discourses and languages of art history, treating them with an ironical wink of the eye. The extreme composition of these verbose statements and images lends the effect of cracking and the loss of place, emphasized by the action's lack of a specific time and place. The image thus established has no frame. It embraces rather a chain of events and situations, in which leaving the conventionality of canvas, we go out into a space underpinned by irony, beyond the thin line of reality. The film can be read as a foundation, the base on which the painter's execution arose.

Piotr Sikora

........