Gerard Kwiatkowski: Embodying Historical Complexities in Postwar Polish “Recovered Territories”
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- Written by Dorota Michalska (London/Warsaw)
The following text initiates "Artist Files," a new series devoted to forgotten, understudied, or otherwise marginalized artists from the former Eastern Europe. The artists whose work we want to introduce have eluded recognition not only abroad--a fate that's common enough for artists from the region--but also in their own countries, and for a broad variety of reasons. This essay devoted to Gerard Kwiatkowski focuses on the work of this important Polish-German artist, whose role as a curator and founder of EL Gallery often overshadowed his artistic practice.
Artists from the Former Eastern Europe in Berlin: Ewa Partum
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- Written by Sven Spieker (Berlin)
The following conversation with Ewa Partum—one of the essential first-generation conceptual artists from Poland—is the first in a series devoted to artists from the former Eastern Europe who live and work in the city. For the last two decades, post-Wall Berlin has been touted as one of global art's most celebrated--because least expensive--production centers. Yet the city's history as a destination for artists from Russia and East-Central Europe goes back much longer: from the 1920s, when the number of Russian writers and artists who lived and worked here arguably exceeded the number of German ones; to the Cold War, when Berlin functioned as a kind of East/West exchange for artists from the countries from behind the Iron Curtain. Ever since then, the city has sought to cultivate, and profit from, its aura as an incubator for aesthetic ideas that cannot find traction elsewhere. Our series seeks to confront the hype with the often very different experiences by artists who have worked and lived here for many years.
Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings (Book Review)
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- Written by Amy Bryzgel (Aberdeen)
For quite some time, all that was available to the researcher of contemporary art related to the Latvian experimental music group Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings/Nebijušu Sajūtu Restaurēšanas Darbnīca (NSRD), were a few lines here and there, scattered across catalogues, essays and random texts. Mysterious references to Binocular Dances and Walks to Bolderāja captivated those who wanted to know more. For these reasons, this long-awaited anthology on NSRD and its two founders, the writer, musician, and visual artist Juris Boiko (1954-2002) and musician, architect, and multi-media artist Hardijs Lediņš (1955-2004), recently published by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, is indeed a welcome addition to the library of contemporary art history. For the first time, this substantial tome outlines the main philosophies, texts, and artworks of the group, which was active in Latvia mainly in the 1980s, but whose activities continued and were also revisited after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Latvia’s regaining of independence. NSRD produced the first multi-media art in Latvia and was among the first to create participatory art works in the country. Their unique combination of music, architectural theory, and philosophy makes them among the most important contemporary artists in Latvia, and their work offers an original contribution to global avant-garde art.
Was Australian art ever provincial? A RESPONSE TO TERRY SMITH’S "THE PROVINCIALISM PROBLEM: THEN AND NOW" (ARTmargins 6, no. 1, February 2017, pp. 6-32)
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- Written by Rex Butler (Melbourne) and A.D.S. Donaldson (Sydney)
Who would deny the importance of Terry Smith’s “The Provincialism Problem”, originally published in the September 1974 issue of Artforum? Certainly, not Smith himself, who provided an account of its writing and intellectual background to mark the 40th anniversary of its publication, first in a lecture delivered at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and then on the pages of Artmargins. And it is true: “The 'Provincialism Problem” did influence the thinking about Australian–and other “provincial” cultures’–art for a considerable period of time. We would say, to be generous, for almost thirty years. It’s an extraordinary achievement. But it does so no longer.
Art and/as Radical Labor: We Wanted a Revolution at the Brooklyn Museum
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- Written by Jared Quinton (New York/Chicago)
Before you enter the first exhibition gallery of the Brooklyn Museum’s We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, the title communicates an internal contradiction. The action and hope expressed by its signal words—“revolution” and “radical”—is complicated, perhaps even negated by the past tense of “wanted,” which turns the urgency of the declaration into a doleful complaint of a promise thwarted. It’s a fitting introduction to an exhibition that assembles a group of black women artists who embraced near-utopian ideals at the same time that they were fully immersed in the logistics of organizing against (and surviving) racism and sexism. At its core, We Wanted a Revolution poses a compelling, unanswered question: can an exhibition effectively lodge a critique of structural exclusion in a context produced and defined by said exclusion?
