Grzegorz Kowalski's art and didactics were strongly influenced by two of his professors at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, were he studied at the Faculty of Sculpture in 1959-1965.
Back then rigidly hierarchical master-apprentice relationships and attachment to the expressive and figurative tradition in sculpture were the standard. Meanwhile, both at Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz's sculpture studio and at Oskar Hansen's Solids and Planes Studio, hierarchy was blurred: students' autonomy was prized; rational, analytical thinking and argumentation were valued. Jarnuszkiewicz coined the term “partnership didactics”, a notion Kowalski uses to this day to describe his approach. He stressed that a studio is shaped by its students too. As a creator of abstract, geometrically complex metal sculptures, he emphasised the poetic and humanist aspect of sculpting. Thanks to scholarship visits, Oskar Hansen, an architect, urban planner and theoretician of visual arts, had with the opportunity to meet the great pioneers of modernism, such as Fernand Leger (for whom he worked as an apprentice), Picasso, or Le Corbusier. After returning to Poland, he worked in planning large housing estates. Kowalski, like his entire generation, was influenced by Hansen's theory of open form.
The language of analysis of visuality and space, which describes the form as being e.g. “dynamic” or “static”, “heavy” or “light”, or “closed” and “open” constitutes a key element of the theory of open form. In the last distinction, the term “open” applies to architecture, which becomes a “background for events”, bringing people and their activities in space into the foreground. It is indeterminate and fluid, it encourages collective participation, but at the same time it underscores and provides with a framework for individual agency and expression. This unique language of translating visuality, or its descriptive grammar, so to speak, is taught at ”Kowalnia” to this day.
Kowalski made his debut at the avant-garde Foksal Gallery – then a prestigious, leading Polish institution with contacts in Western Europe, concentrating pioneers of action art, happening and installations. There, he exhibited his “dynamic environments” and “audiovisual séances” – installations open to the participants' creative actions.
In 1968, he leaves for a sculpting symposium accompanying the Olympic Games in Mexico City, where he builds the monumental, geometric “Sundial”. Soon afterwards, he is awarded a scholarship and an internship at the University of Illinois in the United States.
Kowalski stresses that the year 1968 was a turning point in his biography and self-understanding. He experienced the antisemitic campaign of March 1968 in Warsaw, the Tlatelolco massacre during his stay in Mexico City, and soon afterwards, from across the ocean, he follows the invasion of Czechoslovakia..
As he once observed in a biographical interview: “If until '68 one would attempt to establish some sort of cooperation within the framework of this regime, simply in order to live and to do something positive... Some form of cooperation was accepted... After '68, there were no illusions left – this was a system that could not be reformed in any way, it had to be rejected”. He also describes this as the moment when he “became a dissident.
During his travels through the United States, he also witnessed the explosion of the hippie movement in New York. This experience had a strong and lasting impact on him. He decided to abandon his ambitions of a career as a “symposium artist” and a sculptor of monumental forms, choosing to be active in a small community of art aficionados instead.
Kowalski gets involved in a group of artists established by former students of Hansen and Jarnuszkiewicz, set around a small gallery at the University of Warsaw and Warsaw's high street. Although the venue was provided by the party-controlled Polish Students' Association, it had a decidedly “off” air and in time, actions at the gallery were becoming increasingly political and critical towards the authorities. This evolution culminated in participation in a student strike and occupation of the university just before the imposition of martial law, which led to the closing of both the university and the gallery.
However, for those involved in Repassage Gallery, the community itself, and the deepening of relations within a small group of friends, forming a safe haven in the society, were more important than reaching out to a wider audience and creating artefacts. They spoke of “the art of being together” and the primacy of experience over creation, and dedicated themselves primarily to performative and processual actions co-created by the participants. The gallery did not establish a programme and refrained from assuming aesthetic or ideological criteria in advance. This resulted in opening to amateur and naive art, as well as in the rejection of the distinction between artists and non-artists. At the height of its activity, Repassage was led by Elżbieta and Emil Cieślar.
In this environment, Kowalski starts to pose his “basic questions” which were to be answered by means of plastic arts or performances: “Could You and Would You Like to Become an Animal in Front of the Camera?” (1977-78), “Could You and Would You Like to Treat Me Like an Object?” (1979), and “Would You Like to Return to Your Mother's Womb?” (1981-87). Actions with people materialise as “photographic objects”, “tableaus” or “collections”.
In the words of art historian Łukasz Ronduda, Kowalski “attempted to saturate Hansen's quasi-scientific (objective and rationalist) discourse, as well as the paradigm of games and co-operations followed by the master and his students in a similar vein, with a human element: strongly existential, sensual, subjective, irrational, psychologising, even spiritual”.
The didactic method at Kowalski's studio at the Academy of Fine Arts continues with Jarnuszkiewicz's and Hansen's partnership-based approach, drawing from theoretical innovations and a set of exercises developed by the latter, from collective actions carried out by the students – such as Wiktor Gutt, Zofia Kulik, Przemysław Kwiek and the Cieślars – as well as from the countercultural spirit of the community around Repassage. Kowalski emphasises that he prefers “education” – developing autonomous artistic personalities – rather than “teaching” – imparting the rules of the craft and historical forms. At the same time, as Karol Sienkiewicz points out, Kowalski's didactic approach is characterised by a tension between the individual and the collective, it is a “search for balance between one's own problems, identity, personality, individual expression and interpersonal relations, events in collective memory, and functioning in society”.
This tension is built into the student exercises at the studio. Individual assignments require cooperation in a team (students become cameramen, soundmen, and models for their colleagues) and are subsequently collectively discussed in depth. The most important exercises assume the form of a game or an art dialogue, based on non-verbal communication, carried out in sequence and alternately by all the students of the studio. They are recorded, subjectively edited by each student and then collectively discussed. The programme culminates in an exercise titled '”A Common and Individual Zone” – a recurring event consisting in multiple days of collective, performative-visual conversation, initiated by slogans similar to Kowalski's early “basic questions”. “Statements” included i.a. placing a coffin, a steel scaffolding, naked bodies, large-format portraits of participants, or Asian dancers with fans in the common space, and even a balancing act on ropes under the ceiling. Parallel to exercises such as these, Kowalski's assistants teach students the newest audiovisual technologies – photography, camera work, as well as digital video and sound editing.
Kowalski's studio drew the attention of art aficionados thanks to the fact that students at “Kowalnia” included a group of acclaimed and famous Polish artists, such as Artur Żmijewski, Katarzyna Kozyra, Paweł Althamer, Katarzyna Górna or Jacek Adamas. Their work was dubbed the “critical art” movement of the '90s.
The most widely discussed of the works of the movement was Katarzyna Kozyra's 1993 thesis project entitled “Animal Pyramid”. Kozyra recreated the iconic image of the “Town Musicians of Bremen” in the form of a sculpture made of stuffed animals. However, the visually attractive, figurative presentation, almost “pop” in its aesthetics, was accompanied by a video documenting the purchase of a live horse, as well as its subsequent euthanasia and taxidermy. The artwork can be interpreted as an attempt to use the outrage provoked by the killing of an animal “for the sake of art” to highlight the hypocrisy and vow of silence surrounding the killing of animals. A series of outraged comments created an aura of scandal around the artwork, but elevated Kozyra to stardom in the art world.
In 2010 the archive was donated to the Artists' Archives of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and is available online.
Sources:
Ronduda Łukasz, Sztuka polska lat 70. Awangarda, Warszawa 2009.
Sienkiewicz Karol, Dydaktyka partnerstwa Grzegorza Kowalskiego, „Obieg”, 14.10.2011, http://archiwum-obieg.u-jazdowski.pl/rozmowy/22653.
Kowalski Grzegorz (edit.), Kowalnia 1985-2015, Katowice 2015.
Autobigraphical narrative interview with Grzegorz Kowalski. Interviwer: Piotr Szenajch, unpublished material. Interview conducted 13-30.04.2014.
