An interview with Jan Swidzinski

Lukasz Guzek, 2011-02-07

One of the most important artists and art theoreticians in Poland - Jan Swidzinski says: "The main difference between art now and in the past is that the role of the spectator was to recognize what the artist wanted to say. Spectator or listener had no active role. Today he does. He is incorporated into the work, as in performance art, or has freedom of interpretation. He is able to find something in art just for himself. Because everything changes so quickly, our meetings are short, so what really matters are space, time, ambience; not some kind of permanent being, but being in the exact moment, here and now".

Lukasz Guzek
Do you remember the beginnings of your performance?

Jan Swidzinski
I do not, I have never made any chronicle of my performances. They usually took place during festivals. I also opened my exhibitions with a performance. I have visited every performance art festival in the world. I organized them here, which made Poland an important centre of performance.

Performance activity in Poland started at the I AM festival in 1978, organized by the Remont gallery, directed by Henryk Gajewski, with whom I closely cooperated. It was formally a student gallery, so older people like me or Zbigniew Dlubak were advisors, supervising that undertaking from behind.

During my first performances I surrounded myself with chairs and then scattered them. In these times it had a political context - that we need to release ourselves from what surrounds us. It was in 1976 in Krakow, in the Krakowska Kuznica gallery, which had left-wing tendencies, run by the late Stanislaw Urbanski. Then in 1980 I took part in the festival organized by him named "Contact. From propaganda to contemplation", which also took place in Krakow. In 1979 I made a performance in Canada. The meeting was organized by the French collective, L’Art Sociologique working in Calgary. During this time, my book Art Society and Self- consciousness was published there. From there I went to the Western Front in Vancouver. In 1985 I was in the Western Front and Halifax, where my stay was organized by Bruce Barber. My important performance in Poland was Blurring in Lublin in 1984. I blurred a text drawn on the wall, which also had its political context. In the 1980s I started to make more performances. I took up performance art because of my contextual theory and my experience with dance, using body movement and gesture to make a performance.

For me a text, an installation, photographs, an exhibition that comes from it all and live action create full composition. It is, however, characteristic of art nowadays.

L.G.
In your texts you often mention that performance is the most important practice for you.

J.S.
Yes, because it refers to the origins of art, when what we consider as art, has not yet existed. Art covers two human activities: one is performed to produce
something; the other to express something and communicate with others, for example using gesture, or on a higher level, by using words and language. The oldest form of expression is dance: crowds surrounding an altar, people raising their hands in the gesture of prayer. These rituals are given a rhythm by music, which brings order and space, because everyone must do something together. It is accompanied by an oral statement. Ancient Greeks saw this bond between a word, music and dance. It was something else than techne, which meant creating something, for example a sculpture or a painting. Their point of view was not strange, because creating something and expressing it are two different subjects. Combination of these two activities took place in the eighteenth century. By analogy we can better understand the processes occurring between performance and music, poetry of sound, what Cage did. It is also close to installation and other types of forms. Our contemporary withdrawal from art is not a withdrawal from art in general, but from formalized art.

L.G.
You have said that performance is a key practice of contextual art.

J.S.
The main difference between art now and in the past is that the role of the spectator was to recognize what the artist wanted to say. Spectator or listener had no active role. Today he does. He is incorporated into the work, as in performance art, or has freedom of interpretation. He is able to find something in art just for himself. Because everything changes so quickly, our meetings are short, so what really matters are space, time, ambience; not some kind of permanent being, but being in the exact moment, here and now. And also valuing and sensing what is happening now. We are not discussing values; we are not telling what is right or wrong. Everyone has his own criteria and they cannot be valued, we don’t have a common point of view. Of course, we can like something or not, but this is our personal view. We don’t have a common language. We are meeting people of different cultures. Art is acting now, in this particular moment, it causes some kind of emotional state, it is associated with something. We alone are constructing our reality, but not necessarily in harmony with the one in which we previously existed. This is how it is at performance art festivals.

But our reality is also like performance art. I remember when I was in New York, there was an artist who was walking with a long stick in colorful stripes all the time. It was his action. He was Andre Cadere. He is mentioned in Paul Ardenne’s book Contextual art as an example of an intervention in urban reality. In Poland such interventions were done by the Academy of Movement (Akademia Ruchu). Take another example: today films are being made very easily. We are not concerned about the way they are made (as in structuralism) but we have to capture the moment of reality. This activity has a character of a performance – that is a temporary one. Another example are installations – artists today are different from those from the first half of the twentieth century, because they are not attempting to create something pretty, but something opposite – because beauty is not the topic of art now. Duchamp’s ready-mades are also a kind of performance. Today very different things are considered to be art.

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