Dunikowski’s art not only originates from, but still belongs to the circle in which art assumes the form of a unique set of games, outlined above. His affiliation with the artistic formation which emerged in the 1970s and lent impetus to the attitude/tendency described herein is hardly debatable4. Instead, I wish to consider the character of Duniko’s approach during this source period, as well as its subsequent continuations and transformations. We are already at a remove of almost a quarter of a century from that decade, and Dunikowski’s art has, in the course of time, undergone many significant alterations.
In the first half of the 1970s Dunikowski’s artistic practices were often located on the border between art and extra-artistic reality. The projects realized in public spaces transcended both the institutional frames of artistic endeavor – abandoning its sacral spaces and relocating to the street or to places of public convenience – and the notions of representation, characteristic for visual arts, replacing them with text or action (Groceries; Anybody does Know (Who Knows); The Labyrinth; Painting Over Street Plates). Thus, the undertaken game involved art as much as the external reality, but simultaneously it abolished and annulled the boundaries between the two. The object of this game was art as a notion and as a phenomenal whole, art as a separate and autonomous enclave of reality. The final effect of this game, if played to its logical end, would have been art’s dissolution in the reality external to it, a significant consequence of which would also have been a transformation of that reality, an endowment with new values. In other words, the conclusion and the immanent goal of that game would have been a realization of a utopia which has motivated numerous avant-garde movements since the inception of the twentieth century; namely, the utopia of a desired end to art, resulting from a transformation of reality understood totally.
However, this conclusion of art – at times occurring on the personal plane, where an individual gesture manifesting rebellion and rejection of art may possess a genuine causative power (the artist, like Arthur Rimbaud, may lead art towards its own termination in the context of his own existence, i.e. abandon art) – has never come to pass and its deliberate fulfillment on the social plane will never be possible. Art, similarly to every other element or factor of culture, is a collective creation. An individual gesture does not have much of an influence on the fate of art, and, more precisely, it cannot contribute significantly to the decline of the latter. The individual end-to-art game is endless. Therefore, perhaps, sooner or later a game of this sort will be transmogrified, unnoticeably, into another game – one whose object is not endurance, but merely the quality of endurance. The object of this game is no longer art as a notion, or art as a whole, but its particular features, elements, conventions or qualities.
4 Although his first works were produced in the 1960s, the entire 1970s neo-avantgarde is rooted in the experience and the radical experimentation of the new avant-garde of the preceding decade.
