For the long years of the modernist era art was created as something new. Formal innovation activated the mechanism which created successive avant-garde movements and generated individual thinking. In that period it was a very creative factor, as it opened before art unknown areas to penetrate and initiated apostatic thinking.
This par excellence modernist idea has infiltrated thinking about art so deeply that it determines activities in the art world even now.The principle of novelty has become the primary structure of thinking in art, the formula automatically employed, irrespective of its functional applicability. It concerns both artists and critics as well as the public, that is reception of art by average art viewers used to regard art and evaluate it according to its novelty. However, the modernist principle of novelty has now a rather restrictive influence on thinking in art, makes it impossible to understand modern phenomena and cripples artists’ practical activities. (For instance, the common complaint that ‘everything has already happened’, which questions the meaningful character of creativity.)
Naturally, novelty and innovation have always been important in creative activity, and are also important now. Yet, they are understood differently. Novelty is no longer apprehended in a hierarchical and absolutist way. The principle of novelty does no longer imply the necessity to construct a new layer on top of the old one, thus sealing and cancelling it. Innovation does not work in the ascendant direction, leading to the presupposed absolute, to the ideal.
The anti-absolutism of the idea of novelty means that creative initiatives are undetermined and multidirectional. Innovation today means responding to change rather than inventing a crucial idea, means opening up rather then restricting thinking.
Searching for novelty takes place on the horizontal plane, that is on the level of human reality, it is concerned with the human being and the World as the anthroposphere. It is the well-known area, and yet open to discovery. Thinking in this World means arranging its known elements into new(!) wholes, marking out new (!) routes in its area. Modernist novelty meant generally the novelty of form, while today novelty means first of all searching for meaning.
All this can be found in the general principles of post-modernist thinking, in this case practiced in art. Novelty in art appears to be a collage of the existing elements, strategies and art languages, while originality means indicating new routes, passages and connections in the well-known area. Collage-making reveals new areas of meaning, and the art issues which seeemed to have been resolved appear to be applicable today.
W³adys³aw KaŸmierczak purposefully places his performance beyond the modernist principle of novelty. Its title ‘Dada, da, da, da...’ clearly indicates its starting point. By referring to the Dadaist - and - surrealist concept of art, it points at the same time to the roots of performance art, and as it is the most topical form of art, to the roots of contemporary art generally. An art historian could find some other connections, yet what is most important here is the author’s attitude which defines the performer’s thinking and points to the sources of his art. In performance art, which is so closely identified with the artist, it is more important than historical thruth, relative anyaway
The sound background to the performance was provided by a tape with the recorded texts, interviews, poems and music by the Dadaists: Tzara, Janco, Huelsenbeck, Schwitters and Duchamp. The changing character of the sound track marked the rhythm of the successive parts of the performance. Its structure was based on a quotation from the Dadaist art history - on the well-known work by Duchamp showing a bicycle wheel on a stool. It was ingenuously intertwined into all activities of the performer. In order to achieve his objective, the artist used only a few props and performing devices.
The immaculately dressed artist entered the gallery, adjusted his clothes briefly in front of an old mirror on the wall, sketched the outline of a chair standing nearby on the wall and ‘sat’ on the reflection. In that part of the performance the artist employed body language, typical of living art. It was physical performance, designed to confront his own endurance, to test his corporality, but also to assess his mentality. The use of the chair was clearly intentional. This ordinary commonplace object amounts to an anthropological measure of reality which emphasizes its human dimension. We may not always be aware of the reason why all chairs in the world are roughly of the same size. Thus the performance started with an example of classic performance art.
Then the action moved to the next prop: a bicycle propped upside down. The artist removed the ‘Duchamp’ front wheel, placed it on the wall and drew a stool underneath. Thus a specific replica of Duchamp’s work was produced. Here the ready-made, Duchamp’s artistic principle, appears to be a potentiality not only for objects, but also for their artistic meanings. This gesture elevates Duchamp’s work to the rank of a mytheme - an elementary myth-making factor. This mythologizing of the Dadaist art history intends to introduce it into contemporary reality and to make it participate in this reality in the form of symbolic meanings. The quotation from the Dada classic art, together with the classic performance art presented by the artist in the first part of the event, offer a mixture of reality and fiction, facts and appearances, existence and non-existence, the history and the present of art, all that according to the Dada - and - surrealist mood. These two worlds are connected by the person of the artist - the conditio humana manifested in each form of reality.
In the next phase the place of the removed wheel is taken by the artist himself. The object appears functional not only in the series of symbolic meanings, but also in the constructional sense, in the performance structure. This metaphoric representation intimates the change in the position of the history and the present of art: a close similarity between the remote prehistory of this art and the live performance. Such exchange is possible because of the physicality and mentality of the human being - the artist in this case - that is because of the close connection between art and life. Direct presence in art, once the shocking gesture of the Dadaists, is now practiced in performance art (or more generally, in all living art).
The artist’s body is a specific ready-made in performance art. W. KaŸmierczak, following the procedure in the first part of his performance, puts the chair in the place of the removed wheel and sits on it, in a very physical sense. His face is now covered with slices of raw meat secured with thread. Turning the pedals with his hands he puts the back wheel into motion and presses his cheeks to the tyre. Rubbing against the tyre, the thread makes the sound similar to the recorded Dadaist music played from the tape. The artist repeats this activity many times. Depending on pressure, the sound changes producing Dadaist music, and the wheel tears to pieces the meat covering his face. The physical character of performance art is presented here again. However, it is only presented, toned down, it takes the visual form and not the literal form typical of classic performance, which treats the performer’s body in a savage way and exposes it to real torture.
The performance ends in the artist’s removing remnants of meat from his face, adjusting his clothes in front of the mirror and in his final departure carrying the mirror. The mirror, and more precisely, a reflection in the mirror, is an old method to express our doubt in the real character of reality which turns out to be appearance only. Moreover, the mirror can multiply, it can turn the three-dimentional reality into infinity. Mixing up reality and non-reality is a human condition which the Dadaist - and - surrealist programme intended to implement through art. Removing the mirror means putting an end to art conceived as ambivalece of art and life, the World and the person.What remains is only life, only the artist - only performance art as equivalent to the anthropological dimension of the World.
£ukasz Guzek
translated by Jadwiga Pi¹tkowska