![\"wincenty-dunikowski-duniko-retrospektywa-heidelberger-kunstverein-2001\"](\"https:\/\/ownetic.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/wincenty-dunikowski-duniko-retrospektywa-heidelberger-kunstverein-2001.jpg\")
Critics who wrote about Dunikowski\u2019s art highlighted the artist\u2019s interest in changes, variations, processes, time and temporariness (Konrad Scheurmann). They also pointed out that the sources of his art lie in conceptualism, or in the conceptual discipline \u2013 as Ryszard Stanis\u0142awski put it. Conceptualism still remains a mysterious area, not fully explored and continuously fascinating for new generations of the contemporary art scholars. This can be proved with such recent exhibitions as \u201cRefleksja konceptualna w polskiej sztuce. Do\u015bwiadczenie dyskursu: 1965-1975\u201d \/Conceptual Reflection in Polish Art. Experience of Discourse: 1965-1975\/ (Centrum Sztuki Wsp\u00f3\u0142czesnej, Warszawa, 1999), \u201dLive in Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain 1965-1975\u201d (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2000), \u201cProbation Area. Versuchsfeld Arte Povera, Concept Art, Minimal Art, Land Art\u201d (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2002). The today\u2019s art sources are placed in conceptualism and that is why Dunikowski\u2019s art seems so attractive and so well tuned with the today\u2019s spirit of time. However, what does it mean that Dunikowski\u2019s art grows from conceptual art and that it gave rise to demiurgic and inventive imagination of the artist?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The curators of the London exhibition \u201cLive in Your Head\u201d claim that by the mid-1960s, most of the artists recognized later as conceptualists had internalized the precision and rigor of Minimalism. This, however, was merely a starting point because the truly conceptual art was a reaction against the Minimalist reductionism – a response that arose from the recognition of the unlimited potential of art. Works by Gilbert and George, Barry Flanagan, Bruce McLean, Hamish Fulton, Yoko Ono or Rose Finn-Kelcey transgressed the Minimalistic discipline and bravely entered into intimate relations with the reality, while not avoiding the moral and political provocation. This can be best illustrated with color photographs of Gilbert and George, presented as a banal couple of young Englishmen, which were furnished with the captions \u201cGeorge the cunt\u201d and \u201cGilbert the shit\u201d (the captions were removed when the prints were published in \u201cStudio International\u201d in 1970).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We encounter a very similar situation in the Polish art. In the mid-1960s, clearly crystallized conceptual or protoconceptual attitudes appeared, attitudes permeated with the Minimalist rigor: counted paintings by Roman Opa\u0142ka (since 1965), visualisation of statistical distributions by Ryszard Winiarski (since 1966) and Minimalist forms by Zbigniew Gostomski, which led to the best known piece of Polish conceptual art \u201cIt Begins in Wroc\u0142aw\u201d (1970). These artists as well as many others, such Jerzy Roso\u0142owicz, Edward Krasi\u0144ski, Andrzej Matuszewski, Kajetan Sosnowski following the path of art\u2019s self-purification arrived at pure, non-material idea of art. The early 70s, however, saw the entry of a new artistic generation for which conceptualism, for obvious reasons, was not a destination as for the artists of the older generation referred to above but rather a starting point, a kind of joyful artistic initiation. Conceptual art was for them \u201cthe revelation of creative potential at the stage of a dream.\u201d These artists started to use the new, simple means of notation their ideas, photographs, drawings, texts not only because of their availability and simplicity but also, or rather primarily, because of their opposition against the approved view of art, its tasks, goals, values, means and forms. After all, it was the generation of counter-culture which approached the conceptualism as a means for clearing the art from false myths, redundant celebration, appearances accrued with time and also as a means allowing art to be closer to everyday life. Art and artistic activities were to become part of everyday life and something that would allow to live differently, to differently look at the world, at oneself and at other people. Dunikowski was one of the members of that movement, an active and committed one. Early 1970s saw an origination of many ideas which has been present across Dunikowski\u2019s art: drawing on water, concert with TV sets, using a body for changing materials (melting the wax), red square against van Gogh\u2019s sun flowers \u2013 ideas which confront the art history and at the same time introducing art to the everyday reality of a town, street, shop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Young artists entering the artistic stage in the early 1970s seriously approached the words of Jerzy Ludwi\u0144ski, who wrote in his article \u201cArt in Post-Artistic Age\u201d (1970): \u201cIt is quite possible, however, that today we do not practise art any longer. Simply because we have missed the moment when it transformed into something quite different that we are unable to name. It is certain, however, that what we practise today presents greater possibilities.\u201d Ludwi\u0144ski called this new situation \u201cart in post-artistic age\u201d \u2013 where post-artistic indicates that everything can be art, and nothing, no object or event has to be art because the visual determination of art had disappeared. Artistic categories and criteria of assessment became useless and the notion of art fell to destruction, or \u2013 using a more figurative language \u2013 explosion, bringing it into many individual models of art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dunikowski\u2019s generation was the first generation in Polish art, which had to face these challenges, had to find their place in the post-artistic age. It was the generation capable of seeing art everywhere. \u201cMY BEST PICTURE IS DAY. MY BEST ENGARVING IS NIGHT\u2026.\u201d Finally, it was the first generation, which was able to establish a totally non-institutional, fully alternative system of art because it could show its art everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dunikowski participated actively in the artistic adventure of his generation. He took part in workshops, seminars and exhibitions, including a well known one \u201cCDN \u2013 Prezentacje Sztuki M\u0142odych\u201d \/CDN- Presentation of Young Art\/, organized under the Poniatowski Bridge in Warsaw in 1977. He showed there his works from the series of the so called Moment Art. entitled \u201cDuniko\u2019s Breath\u201d \u2013 it was a sequence of three photographs. On the first one, the artist holds a piece of glass at the level of his face; on the second \u2013 he registers his breath on the glass, and on the third photograph, his face is covered with glass misted over with his breath. This work has turned into a sign, an emblem of Dunikowski\u2019s art and the artist reproduced it many times in his catalogues. No wonder – \u201cDuniko\u2019s Breath\u201d can be considered the artist\u2019s manifesto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The breath of life, soul, something that the Greek called \u201cpneuma\u201d is a proof of life; we bring a piece of glass closer to the lips of an unconscious person as to check whether this person still breathes, whether he\/she is still alive. For Aristotle, the pneuma was a link between the non-material spirit and material flesh, a link that conveys life energy form the flesh to the spirit and from the spirit to the flesh; for Stoics \u2013 it was a force reviving not only human bodies but the entire universe. Grasping the breath means to capture the simplest, the most ephemeral and transitory thing, and at the same time to praise life for the life sake \u2013 to live means to breathe. We live as long as we breathe, as long as we haven not given up the ghost, as long as pneuma keeps our limbs, our spirit and mind alive. The artist who covers himself with his breath is the artist concentrated on the energy of life, on art that grows from that life as naturally as breathing. The artist who draws with his finger in his breath is the artist who makes life the matter of his art (\u201cDrawing in Breath\u201d, 1976). The artist who along with his wife registers his breath on glass is the artist who incorporates his privacy into the area of art (\u201cJoint Print with Breath\u201d, 1980).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the 1980s, Dunikowski\u2019s art began to look different. The artist introduced materials, which he hardly ever used before. He enlarged the scale of his works and manifested more brave in annexing the space. At the exhibition \u201cStoffwechsel\u201d (Kassel, 1982), i.e. the change in a material, he showed an installation called \u201cState of Readiness\u201d constructed with branches and twigs. They were painted white, red and black and were arranged in a rhythmical order, tied in bundles or covered with pieces of fabric and dust. Seemingly, everything has changed \u2013 the material, scale, means, yet the problem remained the same: how to capture an instant, moment, time? The work did not carry as intimate and personal meanings as registration of the artist\u2019s own breath. For Ryszard Stanis\u0142awski, and not only for him, Dunikowski\u2019s installation was associated with rolled up banners, ready to use truncheons, stakes to be set on fire, that is with a state of political alertness, with political picture of Poland during the marshal law (this association was further strengthened by colors used by the artist, though their meaning was more general, going far beyond the national and mourning symbolic representation). A moment underwent process of monumentalization. However, it was not only the moment of national history that was subject to such a process. Dunikowski monumentalized also his earlier photographic registrations of breath, which now assumed form of color sculptures (1981). Was it an ironic comment on the art self-mythologization? Or perhaps an ironic paraphrase of Goethe\u2019s words \u201cVerweile doch! du bist so schon!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Can art capture ephemeral moments without falling into artistic mythologization? This was the question raised in the 1980s not only by Dunikowski, but also by other artists of his generation, e.g. Jaros\u0142aw Koz\u0142owski (in the series \u201cMythologies of Art.\u201d). Is it possible to avoid the artistic mythology? Is it possible to find a place in-between the mythology of art and reality? Such questions prompted a birth of the installation formula that dominated Documenta in 1992 and a large portion of art on the turn of the 1980s. Installation had become a favorite form of expression for former conceptual artists. Joseph Kosuth said that installations were the expression of the artist\u2019s attachment to a particular place and therefore they were shaped by a context, which can be architectonic, social, psychological, institutional or any other. Installation creates an \u201cevent context\u201d whose meaning-effect stems from the spectator\u2019s encounter with objects used by an artist in a particular place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dunikowski\u2019s art is such an encounter. Each time a different one because they are saturated with meanings of an individual place and because of expectations brought forward by the audience. The meaning of particular objects also changes \u2013 they are always incorporated into something that the artist calls a \u201ccurrent program\u201d and which means that even older works or ideas of the artist gain new, updated sense in the course of such an encounter. Dunikowski does not get attached to meanings of his works, meanings, which would be agreed and fixed. When he says that his favorite program is a current program \u2013 one should believe him, regardless of how paradoxically that might sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dunikowski\u2019s exhibitions carry with them an atmosphere of a refurbishment; from the corners of his privacy the artist brings to light different works and ideas with a view to renewing their meanings in front of the audience. During the refurbishment everything gets moved, extracted from the former state, relocated. Nothing is certain and obvious. After some time, everything turns into normal \u2013 by the time of another refurbishment, which will make us look differently at what we had known so well. Refurbishment, occasional renovation of meanings is equally indispensable in our life as breathing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prof. Grzegorz Dziamski<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Artyku\u0142 publikowany w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Promocja Czytelnictwa og\u0142oszonego przez Ministra Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego<\/p>\n\n\n\n **************************************************<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"promocja-czytelnictwa\"\/](\"\/i\/promocja-czytelnictwa.gif\")
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