Sabine Breitwieser
Edward Krasiński: Les mises en scène

In my presentation I will focus on the concept for the retrospective exhibition I curated on Edward Krasiński for the Generali Foundation in Vienna 2006: the aspect of architecture and design in his work and the role of photography. Based on the legacy of Polish Constructivism, Krasiński conceived for his exhibitions unique exhibition designs, large spatial displays which went beyond the presentation of individual works. Exhibitions became extraordinary environments into which he integrated old and new art objects. Through his very special arrangements of walls, openings, pedestals and objects within a given space, Krasiński provoked the spectators to take on the role of participants and to interact with these often quite theatrical settings. The artist’s studio, which he had first shared with and later took over from the Polish Constructivist Henryk Stażewski, was turned into an artistic environment by Krasiński. This spatial collective artwork functioned also as semi private/public platform to meet and discuss with colleagues and friends. Additionally, the studio became an important subject in later works. Krasiński is most known for his “engagement” with the blue “line” which he first elaborated in his early fragile sculptures. From the late 1960s on he employed a simple blue standardized scotch tape which he always mounted in the same height on both subjects and objects in order to transfer them to art. Photographers such as Eustachy Kossakowski and Tadeusz Rolke accompanied Krasiński’s work for more than forty years. Their role was quite active and not limited to the documentation of the work. On the contrary, Krasiński integrated photographs of his art objects already in his early works and even more, the interaction of the photographers, also provoked certain works of performative character in a very special collaboration.

Blake Stimson
Krasiński and totality

This paper will focus on the way Krasiński's blue line extends its reach from one thing to another and another and in so doing takes on an appropriating relationship to those things. The question I will consider is the meaning or purpose or value of that relationship. For example, responding to an interviewer's conjecture that "on the one side the tape is appropriating space and objects, and on the other it makes them unreal", Krasiński insisted, "on the contrary," that the appropriation "only makes them more real". Indeed, he said, the line "unmasks the reality of what it has been stuck onto".
This study will take the artist at his word on this and address the greater reality that he spoke of by considering what it might mean through the concept of "totality". This concept, it will be assumed, has a history and the presentation will raise the question of its specific form and specific contradictions peculiar to the larger social, political and artistic culture of the 1960s that gave rise to Krasiński's signature innovation. At issue in Krasiński's greater reality, it will be argued, is a promise at once both artistic and political even as it is so in a manner-a manner fundamentally consistent with its age – that it can only fail to realize.

Maria Matuszkiewicz, Karol Sienkiewicz
Alternative Topographies. Henryk Stażewski and Edward
Krasiński – Between the Studio, Gallery and Café

This paper sums up the authors' research conducted during Spring and Summer of 2007. In the face of scarce documentation concerning the apartment-studio of Henryk Stażewski and Edward Krasiński, the authors held several conversations with the artists’ friends and people, who had visited the studio at different times. From 1963 there lived Henryk Stażewski, painter Ewa Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska and her husband Jan Rogoyski, from the beginning of the 70s, Stażewski together with Edward Krasiński, and then, after the painter's death in 1988, Krasiński on his own. For many years the studio was an important meeting place for Warsaw avant-garde and neo-avant-garde society. On the basis of these conversations, the authors managed to recreate the history and meaning of the place in artistic society at different times, and to establish the studio’s circle of regular visitors.
While summarising their research, the authors have encountered not only difficulties caused by the limited documentation concerning the studio, but also with the impossibility to separate artistic facts from the artists' biographies. Sharing the apartment for eighteen years, Krasiński and Stażewski, lived in totally different rhythms and their ways of living marked two different topographies on the map of Warsaw. Stażewski's favourite place was the SARP café on Foksal Street, where a large group of artists and critics used to meet. Krasiński liked spending time in bars alone or accompanied by his friends. After Stażewski's death, he became the only user of the studio. In the 90s, he changed it into a total work of art.
The history of Stażewski's and Krasiński's studio seems to run parallel to that of the Foksal Gallery, established in 1966, whose co-founders were the two artists. In the 70s, due to the conflict within the Gallery, and after Anka Ptaszkowska and Mariusz Tchorek, also Stażewski and Krasiński had left the gallery, the studio became a kind of alternative place. The gallery, however, has never ceased to be an important point of reference. In the 90s, several research projects on the history of the Foksal Gallery were initiated and several competing versions of this history emerged. Simultaneously, (unwritten) history of the studio and its symbolic and historic capital entered the orbit of the same disputes.

Rachel Haidu
Edward Krasiński’s Home Work

The apartment-studio of Edward Krasiński describes an ambivalent and blurry distinction between public and private space: it is both an obviously social stage for viewing art, and a space saturated with evidence of minute attention to detail and culinary, frozen arrangement of forms – almost as if we had trespassed on the sanctuary of an obsessive hermit. That contradiction is deliberate. If Krasiński’s final work calls up the joyful and prodigious onanism of system-building, and relates that to the exhibition spaces and “salon” evenings in which the apartment was a participant, it also evokes the perverse relations to comfort and fantasy that one finds in Joseph Cornell’s boxes, Laurie Simmons’ photographs, or Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau. But Krasiński’s work does not mobilize this contradiction apolitically or regressively: or rather, one can say that it is impossible to view Krasiński’s apartment-studio and its deliberate work of recording (labor, attention, presence) without thinking of the enormous changes wrought in Polish everyday life from the time that Krasiński moved in to his friend Henry Stażewski’s apartment in 1969 until his own death in 2004. Partly, this is because the nature of what Krasiński left behind in his studio is radically different from the dynamic, performative operations that he and his colleagues proposed in their art of the 1960s and 1970s. Even the most regimental blue line could be performative when it crossed over and under artworks, door hinges, windows, re-marking the evenness of a directional gaze and its totalizing implications. The static nature of the apartment-studio contravenes the open-ended, experimental approach of Krasiński’s earlier work, and suggests indeed the function of a document, or even forensic evidence. The implication of using one’s home to structure such an evidentiary approach is that the private sphere can legitimately and perhaps even persuasively address concurrent transformations in the public sphere. My talk addresses these questions and the suggestion of propinquity between experiment and document, home and stage, and public and private that orders Krasinski’s final work.

Paweł Polit
Rhetoric of the Blue Stripe

The aim of this paper is to discuss some semantic aspects of the blue Scotch tape stripe used in Edward Krasiński's Interventions. The paper will show the origin of the blue line motif in Krasiński's work – as rooted in the tendency to eliminate volume in former spatial works – and the relation of the works made with the use of it with Theory of Place elaborated by Mariusz Tchorek. It will also be an attempt at describing the specificity of the blue stripe as a visual sign in terms of correspondence with structural properties of photographic image.
The reflection on the nature of visual perception manifests itself in Edward Krasiński's space works from the second half of the 60's. The use of the blue stripe of the Scotch tape enable the artist to develop new methods of commenting upon and questioning the optical status of a work of art. Eustachy Kossakowski's photographic documentation of the first experiments with the tape held by Krasiński in Zalesie Górne in 1969 is a an important context for the interpretation of his later works. These photographs depict the blue stripe – placed horizontally at a height of 130 centimetres – as a kind of navigation tool, useful for viewer's mental exploration of the spaces presented in them. Penetrating illusory depth of the photographic image, or the other way round – stressing the flatness of its surface – the stripe initiates a kind of game between various types of representing space. What became from this moment on a point of reference for Krasiński's subsequent explorations of space was the lens of the camera.
Krasiński's Interventions – diagrams, geometric reliefs, made by the artist from the beginning of the 70s – multiply visual paradoxes and deprive photographic image of the status of objective representation. Installations from the 80s and 90s, in which the operation of the blue stripe is held on reliefs and photographic blow-ups of other spaces, seem to be preconceived by Krasiński as objects of photographic documentation. In the end, each of these spaces of intervention turns out to be illusory and that is why works made with the use of the blue stripe can be described as the “non-site specific”. This notion refers also to those of Krasiński's installations, in which he set the mirror relation between the studio's space and the gallery's space.

Luiza Nader
Heterology of the Blue Line

The project of heterology – “knowledge of what is radically other” was aimed by Georges Bataille against the assumptions of both metaphysics and materialism. The (anti)notion of informe, central for Bataille's thought, referred neither to form nor content, but was rather based on the operation of shifting of the two terms. Informe was an adjective serving to declass things, pointing to a culturally repressed break existing in notions. Horizontally oriented blue line, which emerged in Edward Krasiński's work circa 1968 could be characterised in a similar way: as anti-idealistic, exposing space in its discontinuity and heterogeneity, annuling binary opposition of truth and illusion, Place and reality. Bataille's notion of the informe in its performative dimension was used by Rosalind Krauss and Yve Alain Bois for the purposes of the exhibition and accompanying publication – L’Informe: Mode d’imploi. Their aim was not simply to suit Bataille's reflection to the issues of 20th century art nor make it into an object of historical research, but to concentrate on the movement of the notion of informe, deepening the fissures in the edifice of historical modernism.
In this paper, I concentrate on categories, conceived by Krauss and Bois and referring to Bataille's thought, such as horizontality, entropy, pulse, base materialism, and zone, and apply them to some aspects of Edward Krasiński's work. I discuss informe as implied by the line: telephone cable winding the artist around in J’ai perdu la fin!!!, words forming an endless line, blue tape stuck by the artist onto objects; line trespassing marginal, everyday and culturally sanctified reality, and annulling schematic public/ private space division. Blue line mixed artistic and non-artistic values, spaces of memory and forgetting. It was becoming a void or a paradoxical break uniting things, people and spaces. Slipping high values into everyday reality, humiliating or ridiculing culturally established hierarchies and classifications, the line functioned similarly to Bataille's unproductive forms of expenditure and consumation. Applying the logic of repetition (blue Scotch, at the height of 130 cm) Krasiński, in a similar way as Bataille, concentrated on what made the repetition important – on what in every repetition was radically other.

Klara Kemp-Welch
Articulating the ‘Between’: Stażewski’s Critical Spaces

Following Stanisław Dróżdż’s landmark exhibition Between at the Foksal Gallery in 1977, Henryk Stażewski wrote a short Inquiry into the Word “Between”. He described the Between as a “place”, as an “attitude”, and as a series of “antipodes” (there follows an extensive list, including thesis and antithesis, theory and practice, empiricism and transcendence). The sheer length and the conceptual range of Stażewski’s list might suggest, like Tadeusz Kantor’s sardonic happening The Dividing Line (1966), that everything ultimately must reside either on one side of a line, or on the other. But the Between is an attempt to articulate a third term: a potential (and a desire) to go beyond the rigidity of binary structures. And a line need not always divide. In Edward Krasiński’s blue line and Duchamp’s Mile of String (1942), line carves out critical space. It activates architectural, institutional, discursive and interactive space, undermining the usual assumption that line is the insubstantial opposite of space. Line, in these cases, has thickness. It is a tangible intervention – a new space.
This paper examines the Between as a critical attitude in relation to Henryk Stażewski’s serial abstract reliefs from the late 1950s to the 1970s. The avant-garde relief is usually read as a critical move from pictorial space out into the world – into the “real” space of the spectator, or, conversely, as a strategy that brings the external world into the same spatial order as that of the artwork. This paper looks at how this relation is played out internally. What happens in the spaces between the picture surface and the raised surfaces of the relief? I propose that the Between may be characterised by the same “desperate vitality” that Roland Barthes attributed, at around the same time, to the Neutral. Stażewski’s position as both a key member of the historic avant-garde and of the neo-avant-garde in central Europe, makes his work a particularly compelling site for engagement with this condition.

Alexander Alberro
Edward Krasiński’s Dynamic Line

In the 1960s, the word “kinetic” assumed a large number of stylistic connotations, most of them purely technical. The kinetic was interpreted literally (i.e., actual movement), descriptively (i.e., a representation of movement), and metaphorically (i.e., the allusion of movement). My paper will explore the impact of kinetic art practice on the 1960s work of Edward Krasiński. I will argue that although Krasiński’s sculpture of this period may appear static the structure of this work is dynamic. More specifically, I will maintain that Krasiński's sculpture metaphorically investigates the dynamic potentialities of the line: the line conceived not as the boundary of the image it renders, but as an active force moving freely without bounds. Krasiński’s 1960s work uses movement not as an isolated element but as a whole structure that posits a new relationship of the sculpture to its surround and to the spectator.

Andrzej Turowski
From Żmijewski, to Stażewski

My paper deals with relations between the discourses on “the political dimension of the image” in the latest works of Artur Żmijewski and the art of Henryk Stażewski. I discuss the process of repetition (repetition as construction) of the avant-garde procedures and senses embodied in the concept of the artist as a regressive Narcissus in Żmijewski's work in relation to Stażewski's utopia and his vision of the artists as an anarchic rebel, unmasking his/ her own avant-garde Logos (conceptualisation as deconstruction). Żmijewski/Stażewski relation provides a pretext for a further discussion of the role of art in the post-communist period, and for “rethinking anew,” as a basis of the project (practice) of the Foksal Gallery Foundation circle.

transl. Katarzyna Bojarska