Sculpture June 2004 Vol. 23 No.5

Oronsko, Poland

“Art of the 3rd Republic of Poland: Re-presentation of Artistic Facts, Triennial of the Young”

Center for Polish Sculpture

“Art of the Third Republic of Poland: Re-presentation of Artistic Facts, Triennial of the Young” was the last in a decade-long trilogy of grass-roots- cultivated exhibitions and symposia at the Center for Polish Sculpture in Oronsko.  This exhibition – as well as the previous ones, “Sites, Non-Sites” and “Status Quo,” held in 1992 and 1996 respectively – reflected the selfless efforts of numerous prominent Polish art professionals concerned about the next generation of Polish sculptors.  They sought to identify and assist young working artists who have been largely absent from prominent exhibition venues and critical attention.

Some, but not all, of the works in this exhibition were qualitatively and conceptually consistent with their international counterparts, featuring a wide range of styles, media, and subject matter.  Several performance-based works dealt with individual/social identity.  One starkly simple example was Marcin Szydlowski’s Opozycja Niewidzialnosci (Opposition to Invisibility).  The well-crafted, darkly tinted triangular metal container, open on two sides like a modified version of the tetrahedron shape that Alexander Graham Bell employed in his kite (flying machine) experiments at the turn of the 20th century, appeared to use electricity, but it was not evident what role, if any, this played. Presumably designed for walk-oriented performances, this tongue-in-cheek commentary may attract the substantive personal or professional attention it (half) jokingly solicits.  Futeraly (Cases), by Pawel Kaszczynski, grazed against a similar “selfless” theme.  Assembled from white Styrofoam insulation panels, a hollow, life-sized, angular robot-like figure leans forward, bent 90 degrees from the waist, waist with a protruding open orifice-as-head. The overriding reaction was to place one’s head into the opening.  Light and sound were subdued, and there was nothing remarkable to see or hear inside other than one’s own heartbeat interspersed  with muffled echoes from outside.  Rather than a hollow disappointment, when afforded ample time and subjective latitude, the piece was comtemplative and complex. 

Dominik Dlouhy used the human body more objectively, as evidenced by his female figure partially submerged in a bathtub, Kobieta w Wannie (Woman in Bath).  As a technically proficient figure study, or more likely a body cast, it is convincingly crafted, although not as meticulously detailed as Duane Hanson or John DeAndrea. The figure appears to be holding her breath, but considering her lifeless skin color, closed eyes, submerged head, and parted legs, she seems to float somewhere between subject and gratuitous (or Gruesome) objectification.

Zbigniew Libera addressed objecthood more blatantly with Universal Penis Expander, which mocks generations of “life-changing” fantasy fitness gadgets and the people who buy them.  An amusing but unnecessary retouched photo of a standing man (presumably by the artist) displays the exaggerated results that this machine, like all vanity contraptions, promises, but can’t deliver.  Sebastian Panczyk played a more complex game with Bez Tytulu (Without Title). A classical plaster head study is retrofitted with a life-like pink rubber oral cavity insert to produce a haunting hybrid that eerily grafts together classical Greek ideals, Red Cross Resuscitation dolls, and blow up sex toys.

Mariusz Front’s pleasantly peculiar Mechaniczne Zwiazki (Mechanical Connections) called into question the very technology that it employed.  It consisted of a series of square black wooden frameworks connected by operable red-painted windshield wiper blades and electrical motors.  Kinetic and eerie, like something out of Mad Max or Blade Runner, these rehabilitated junkyard appendages jerked and hummed with implied menace.  With its caricatured, yet oddly organic insect-like movements, this piece was simultaneously foreboding and funny.

Two works stood out as accomplished.  The first was by Jaroslaw Kozakiewicz, who presented a model for a Satellite Receiving Station at Dundee University in Scotland.  Titled Merkury, Kozakiewicz’s brilliantly conceived and acutely sensitive design responds to the site and the client.  In plan, the proposed grass-covered landscape of rolling/folding earth mounds resembles the outer and inner ear, which smartly connects the site to its intended purpose.  The very functional layout would be open at the surface at the surface in order to capture as much light and sound as possible and deliver them to the underground workstation.  This is landscape architecture at its functional and symbolic best.

The other standout work was by Slawomir Brzoska, who produced a site-specific installation in a chapel on the grounds.  Brzoska accentuated the intimacy of the interior by blocking all exterior light.  Softly lit with black lights, the space was filled with tautly stretched and evenly spaced pale strands, hung from the niches of two central opposing windows on each side wall.  The luminous pale fibers were affixed to the floor of the opposite walls at equally regular intervals.  The results were striking: two beautiful parabolas intersected in the middle of the space, reductively calming and arguably spiritual.  This linear light weaving, masterfully conceived and assembled, evoked Naum Gabo’s linear constructions with piano wire and nylon filament, the intersecting hallucinatory patterns of Op Art, and Renaissance depictions of divine light.

If this collection of works defined the direction of an emerging and promising generation of Polish sculptors, it also revealed that while the horizon is a ways off, the promise that lies beyond will make the journey worth the wait.

--Byron Clercx