Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek studied together at the same time at the Faculty of Sculpture at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts under the supervision of Oskar Hansen and Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz. The didactic and theoretical activities of these two professors had transformed into a multigenerational tradition, which to this day remains important for a number of outstanding Polish artists.
Kwiek and Kulik were under particularly deep influence of Oskar Hansen’s theory of Open Form, which stressed the importance of finding a language to comment on or translate visual forms. Hansen proposed terms such as: dynamic and static, light and heavy, open and closed. In this last distinction, the “open” form describes such architecture, that becomes a “background for events”, accentuating the presence of people and their activities in space. „Open form” is indefinite, variable, and it incites collective participation, while bringing forward and setting the framework for individual expression and subjectivity. „Closed” forms, on the other hand, aggressively loom over their vicinity, are difficult to modify, and dominate the people around them. The milieu set around Hansen and Jarnuszkiewicz moved on from discussions on sculpture and architecture to games and conversations, employing exclusively visual means and gestures. They continued those games in plein-air, and eventually on public space. KwieKulik were among the firsts to record on camera these visual games and dialogues. These games could well take place in their private apartment or on the face of a popular actress (Game on an Actress’s Face). Once even the son of the couple, Dobromierz, became a “pawn” in such a visual game (Activities with Dobromierz).
Other notable examples of experimental methods of artistic work pursued by KwieKulik, aside from the visual games, include “interactions” (współdziałania), “provocation with the camera” (prowokowanie kamerą), “interrupted projection” (projekcja przerywana), and “activities for a camera” (działania dokamerowe).
All these terms introduced by KwieKulik described unscripted processual, collective and performative activities which often engaged random passers-by, and which usually left behind a photo or film registration.
They have also elaborated their own form of appropriation art, which they referred to as “parasitic art” or “commentary art”. During art events they composed space arrangements of other artists' sculptures and they made interventions in other artists’ short films (Activities with One-Minute Films).
Clearly Kwiek and Kulik had inclinations for conceptual work, i.e. devising their own repertoire of artistic techniques and their own language to describe art (the Kwiekulik Dictionary was placed in a monumental book summarising their artistic career).
They drew inspiration for their activities from contemporary developments in scientific and theoretical research in cybernetics, IT, miniaturisation, automation, and praxeology (the theory of acting efficiently).
As early as during their studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kwiek and Kulik began to record their artistic activities, using photographs and slides. They referred to the results of these actions as “aesthetic time-effects”, and called the growing collection the Bank of Aesthetic Time-effects.
In 1972 they moved in together to an apartment in Warsaw-Praga, near popular sites of the district, i.e. Targowa street, Wileński Station, and the Różycki Bazaar. The apartment had belonged to Kwiek’s family for generations. In a separate part, albeit with a common kitchen and bathroom, still lived Kwiek’s mother and four of his siblings. Nonetheless, Kwiek and Kulik used one of their two rooms to found the Studio of Activities, Documentation and Propagation (PDDiU). It served as their studio, archive, and space for displaying art, including holding exhibitions. Usually it would host slideshows with commentary for invited guests from Poland and abroad.
KwieKulik saw documentation of their own and other artists’ actions not as a mere secondary, auxiliary activity on the side of their proper art, but rather as “directly linked to the artistic programme”. Zofia Kulik explains the mind-set behind the continuous growth of the archive with the transformations in art that took place in the late 1960s as related to the introduction of new image registration technologies.
“It seems to me that we were absolutely pioneers”, Kulik remarks on one occasion.
However, the price for innovativeness was the effort to overcome other artists’ habitual mind-set towards art, including the neo-avant-garde milieu, which KwieKulik were part of. Kulik speaks openly about fighting for recognition of their activities as a fully-fledged art.
“It fitted into certain patterns of thinking, or even financing, and creating institutions.
But is documentation a work of art? No, that was too much.
So when does it become a work of art?
Even today these questions are not at all clear and straightforward.”
“For us, documentation was a documentation of a process, a certain sequencing of actions or operations on materials. While for others, it was something that you don't hang in the main exhibition hall, but rather in the corridor. Not in a frame but in a display cabinet. […]”
Today, Zofia Kulik perceives registering, gathering, and describing the works of others as an attempt to preserve the richness and diversity of ephemeral phenomena from vanishing. She describes this work as “creating a panorama” of this period’s art, that would take into account also “those who perished”. Therefore, this panorama displays a strong personal touch. “This history of art is of our making” – Kulik says.
The artistic career of Przemysław Kwiek and Zofia Kulik saw two major turns: the appearance of the Neue Wildemovement, which returned to the individualistic, irrational, art for art’s sake ethos, and then the downfall of Polish People's Republic, and the shift in public discourse towards market and conservative values. Both of these phenomena contradicted the vision of doing art and the worldview of the duo. Moreover, they noted that other artists began to pay greater attention to documenting their own art. All this contributed to gradual suppression of their artistic activities.
Although they have attempted to obtain funding for establishing an organisational and professional form for their archive already in the times of Polish People's Republic, they failed. After 1989 the Archive was “shelved” “in oblivion” for many years.
In 1987 Zofia Kulik concluded her artistic collaboration with Kwiek and started her own independent artistic project. She abandoned the open form and performative actions. In a way, her work became the exact reversal of notions and ideas that had represented her activities as a duo. Instead, she began to create “closed forms”, such as photographic collages, which were static objects, “closed” to any interference by others, while visually mimicking the ordered, hierarchical, organised, and ornamental patterns of cathedrals, altars, oriental carpets, and paintings of kings. Her works were created using a technique of multiple film exposure. They were composed of hundreds of photographs of symbols of totalitarian and military violence, as well as male human bodies twisted in a peculiar alphabet of gestures (e.g. The Gorgeousness of the Self). These works gained substantial recognition in the 1990s and were interpreted i.a. from the perspective of feminist theories.
The popularity of Zofia Kulik’s new project rekindled interest in the activities of the duo, including the Archive. Maryla Sitkowska, an art historian, and Jerzy Truszkowski, an artist and a curator, began to explore it.
Kulik's return to the archive is also related to her rejection of how the 1970s artistic activities of the duo were presented in the art history books – e.g. as having roots in the Repassage Gallery milieu, which they were actually in conflict with.
Currently the KwieKulik Archive is a massive collection of visual and film materials, publications, and works of art, which as a result of many years of Zofia Kulik’s efforts, was converted into an archive-piece, a collection which became a work of art itself.
Although it is still stored and processed at Kwiek’s and Kulik’s detached house in Łomianki near Warsaw, it was purchased in 2011 by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Even before that, it was already established as an institution with a budget of its own, and own employees tasked with organising, digitisation and maintaining contact with other institutions. Museum of Modern Art sees the KwieKulik Archive “not only as an important example of radical artistic actions but also as a contribution to research on the iconosphere of Polish People's Republic and the phenomenon of artistic archives.” (preface to the 2012 book KwieKulik).
The reconstruction of the interior of the PDDiU will become a part of the permanent exhibition at the final location of the Museum.
Zofia Kulik continues her archiving efforts under the brand of Kulik-KwieKulik Foundation. The name is supposed to reflect the fact that after 1989 just one member of the duo engaged in returning the collection to general public.
The attitude of the two artists towards the communist state requires a broader elaboration. Both were born to families involved with its apparatus. Kulik’s father was a colonel in the propaganda department of communist Armed Forces of the Polish People's Republic and she grew up in an isolated military enclave in the city of Warsaw. Kwiek’s mother was a high-ranking party activist in health care administration. His father was also a colonel in the army.
Kwiek and Kulik did not perceive the Party, the organisations it sanctioned, nor the entire state as a hostile regime. On the contrary, they demanded it functioned accordingly to the official, progressive declarations. They expected democratisation, openness, and modernisation, and did not refrain from formulating their requests and criticism in official letters, which they kept sending incessantly. They also used their clashes with institutions in their art.
This ambivalent attitude towards the authorities found little understanding even among fellow artists from the same studios of Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, who created the Galeria Repassage milieu. On one occasion, Elżbieta Cieślar, the co-manager of the gallery, called them “collaborationists”.
The artists however came to develop a highly critical opinion regarding the functioning of the institutions of the Polish People's Republic. Kulik indicates the fundamental contribution of the critical journalism of the weekly Polityka (still existing today) as early as the 1970s. “That was one single large opposition voice “ – Kulik recalls.
Kwiek and Kulik were convinced that artists who created new genres of art deserved a legal, official state sponsorship. It irked them that the only source of financing of their own art, and also any earnings, was hackworking (e.g. carving slabs for monuments and tombstones) assigned by a specially established institution. Therefore, they put forward the idea of creating a Section of Artists of Other Arts Forms at the Association of Polish Artists and Designers. Kulik: “Our observations, these demands and observations [...] They vanished, had no positive response. So they were changing into a spiteful criticism of the system.”
Negative consequences appeared after a short period of time when they committed a series of critical transgressions. In an official letter of complaint they called a high-ranking director of art institution, a friend of the prime minister, a “gangster”. For an exhibition in Malmö they have sent a documentation of their hackworking production of the national coat of arms and titled it “Dick-Man”. In other works they made multiple references to the material poverty of life in communist Poland. They also used the national flag and the red banner.
They did not go to that exhibition in Malmö. Nor did they travel to others: they simply did not have their passports issued, which in practice prohibited them from leaving the country. In spite of his efforts, Kwiek was denied the position as an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and any other steady employment that would allow him to fully dedicate himself to artistic pursuits, as other artists managed to do. Although they tried to join the party, seeing it as an opportunity to introduce positive changes “from the inside”, they were rejected. And, despite of their efforts via official channels, they have never received any funds for formal organisation of their PDDiU archive.
Kulik remarks, however, that she would not refer to their “spiteful criticism” as “opposition” or “underground”. She underlines that many of their artistic actions were sponsored by state institutions, with public funds. “This was possible [only] in Poland” – she adds, comparing the liberty of critically oriented culture to the situation in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany.
Modern commentators see these activities of KwieKulik as “engaged art, reacting to the challenges of its time”, full of “resistance, dissent, protest, subversion, irony” (the publishers of the book summarising the career of KwieKulik). This places them among the “pioneers of critical art” (Anda Rottenberg, art historian). It is “a political art”, “a criticism of the system and a political art of engagement”, “unique, as it opposes both cynicism and anti-politics” (Maciej Gdula, sociologist).
Sources:
Autobiographical narrative interview with Zofia Kulik. Interviewer: Piotr Szenajch. Unpublished material. Interview conducted 4.10.2013.
KwieKulik. Zofia Kulik & Przemysław Kwiek, eds. Łukasz Ronduda, Georg Schöllhammer, Warsaw/Wroclaw/Vienna 2012.
Ronduda Łukasz, Sztuka polska lat 70. Awangarda, Warsaw 2009
Oskar Hansen. Forma Otwarta, Wystawa w Yale School of Architecture w New Haven, 01.09 – 17.12.2016
https://artmuseum.pl/pl/wystawy/oskar-hansen-forma-otwarta-5
Rottenberg Anda, Sztuka w Polsce 1945–2005, Stentor, Warsaw 2005.
Sienkiewicz Karol, Zofia Kulik, Culture.pl, 2005, http://culture.pl/pl/tworca/zofia-kulik
Sitkowska Maryla, Przemysław Kwiek, Culture.pl, 2002, http://culture.pl/pl/tworca/przemyslaw-kwiek
