Jaromir Jedlinski
Journey, Homecoming:
The Great Testament of Tadeusz Kantor
"I now maintain that a genuine work of art is enclosed,
inaccessible. The rôle of the viewer consists in keeping in the shadow
of that work. It is not true that we come to a museum to consume art. It
was the bourgeois cannibalism of the 19th century that was responsible for
the glorification of that non-artistic attitude towards a work of art."
Tadeusz Kantor, 1979
When Tadeusz Kantor was awarded the Prix Rembrandt in 1978, he formulated
his Small Manifesto, containing a statement that refers to the different
registers of his work, to the meanings that are variously evoked by the
exhibition now being presented at the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, of a fragment
of his creative output, comprising paintings and drawings, that has recently
returned from the Galerie de France in Paris to the artist's native country
following the will of his Heiresses. Maria Stangret-Kantor and Dorota Krakowska
have put this legacy on deposit at our Museum. That significant statement
from the Small Manifesto, reads: "It is Reality of the Lowest
Order that accounts for my paintings, emballages, mean objects and miserable
people coming home after a long journey - like the Prodigal Son." *
The journey and the homecoming have been permanent elements immanent in
Tadeusz Kantor's work, in his reflection on art, as well as in his biography.
They defined the theme and the material of his work and determined the artist's
own existence. Itinerant theatre and an itinerant collection of works, stops
in the journey and a pilgrimage. Tadeusz Kantor's constant reference to
the motif of Odysseus/Ulysses seems to suggest his acceptance of his own
fate of an artist-wanderer, but also his belief in the possibility of returning
home. Home and the world - here and elsewhere - these locatives describe
the complementary areas in Tadeusz Kantor's work, and also define the range
of his art's presence, both on the local scale, and in the universal consciousness.
Journeys and homecomings. Hope for the new and nostalgia for what is familiar,
the old. And also memory. And imagination. The coming back
to the "Poor Chamber of Imagination", the returning to the local
with the baggage of the world. Packing up the local and sending it off into
the world. Culture. "The Europe of culture". Cafe Europe, Kantor's
text-summa, or a retrospection of his exhibitions, written in 1990 for his
exhibition in Rome, a Baedeker-catalogue, the confession of a wanderer,
the record of the wanderings of art.
Kantor's letter from Florence, of 3 October 1980, addressed to Stanislaw
Balewicz (co-founder of the Krzysztofory Gallery in Cracow), is characteristic
of this attitude; the artist wrote: "We'll be coming here again in
January. For now we are saying good-bye to the city so similar to Cracow,
with Signoria's tower, Brunelleschi's cupola, Massaccio, Leonardo, Buonarotti,
Savonarola and Machiavelli. I would like to be already saying hello to Weit
Stos, Wyspianski, to the Plants - Gardens of Cracow, and to you, dear Stas."
Kantor also remembered Weit Stos, the wanderings of that artist, any artist,
in Duerer's house in Nuremberg, the city where he also worked himself. But
one may quote here yet another letter, the one written by Heiner Mueller
to Robert Wilson in 1987, which became an inspiration for Wilson to create
the work MEMORY/LOSS, the piece for space/memory, presented at the
XLV Biennale di Venezia in 1993. It referred, in its structure and creative
force, among other things, to Tadeusz Kantor's work, two years after the
artist's death in Cracow. Mueller's letter contains the statement: "There
is no revolution without memory." Kantor's whole biography was the
embodiment of revolution, or "plotting" as he liked to put it,
whose basis was memory; and it was memory, together with its complement
- imagination - that he used as primary material in his life and in his
art, characterized by "extraordinary eclecticism", as was discerningly
observed by Gillo Dorfles. It was the product of the constant pursuit of
maximum reality. During the whole of Kantor's creative life, painting, drawing
and theatre complemented each other, but there was also a competition among
them; painting, drawing and stage-performance engaged in a dialogue, sometimes
even an argument, concerning that maximum reality, eclectic like life itself,
which the founder of Cricot 2 Theatre lived even more creatively than he
was making art. In Tadeusz Kantor's last spectacle Today is My Birthday
(1990, posthumous world premiere in France, in1991), a painting put on a
movable easel found its way onto the stage. This was a meaningful comeback,
a telling symbolic meeting at the end of the journey. The meeting
between the two aspects of Kantor's personality: a theatre personage and
a painter. The meeting between the painting on the stage, and the action
in the painting, manifested in that spectacle, had occurred previously too,
indeed recurred throughout the artist's whole creative life. In his text
entitled The Picture, referring to the spectacle Today is My Birthday,
Kantor wrote: "The only absolute truth in art is arrived at through
presenting one's own life, revealing without shame, discovering one's
own FATE, DESTINY. (...) If I'm arranging my room on the stage, my Poor
Chamber of Imagination - and I'm doing this for the first time - if I'm
arranging the room of a painter - then I have to show his paintings too.
(...) And put them on easels." In his last theatre creation, Kantor
revealed to us his own - "FATE, DESTINY", which are primarily
the fate and destiny of a painter. Today, five years since the artist's
death, we know that we are left with only his paintings, drawings, and also
the props and relics of his theatre. The theatre itself has turned out to
be impossible to continue; it only exists in those objects, aids to the
memory that is alive among both the witnesses and the participants of the
long journey of Kantor's Cricot 2 Theatre, now giving autonomy to stage
objects, bringing into focus the paintings and drawings made during the
fifty years' creative journey of the author of the Great Testament
of our century. It comprises the war-time clandestine performance The
Return of Odysseus, paintings, informel theatre, Popular Exhibition
- Anti-show, the series of drawings People-Dummies and Panoramic
Marine Happening, Emballages and the Theatre of Death - The
Dead Class, the cycle of paintings Everything hangs by a thread,
and the spectacle Wielopole, Wielopole, the series of drawings My
Home and The Chair, the theatre performance Artists Be Damned
and the series of paintings After This, Nothing, Again, and
also spectacle-testament (in the literal sense of the word) Today is
My Birthday. Tadeusz Kantor's legacy consisting of paintings and drawings
forming the essential part of his Great Testament can currently be
seen at the Muzeum Sztuki, which presents the collection of Kantor's works
created between the 1940s and the late 1980s, belonging to the artist's
Heiresses, who have put those works, after their long peregrinations, on
deposit at our Museum. They had been stored for many years at the Galerie
de France in Paris, where they were brought time and again by the artist
himself, and were then exhibited, packed, sent away to other countries,
received again, reproduced in books, etc. After Tadeusz Kantor's death,
which occured on the 8th of December 1990, during the final rehearsals of
the maturing spectacle Today is My Birthday, the Muzeum Sztuki took
it upon itself - following the Successors' wishes - to bring about the return
of those 175 drawings and 35 paintings to Poland, and with the help from
others in Poland and in France, we accomplished this in the summer of 1994.
However, the proper return of the collection is taking place right now -
with the presentation of its greater part at the Muzeum Sztuki. This exhibition
concludes however only a certain phase of documenting Tadeusz Kantor's whole
oeuvre; strictly speaking, it prepares the ground and is a small
step towards making the work of the absent artist become present in the
common house of world art. That work will continue its journey, because
the journey is inherent in it. Like all great art, it is at the crossroads,
dwells at different houses, but avoids feeling at home in any of them. We
know that Tadeusz Kantor was afraid of fixing, making still a work of art.
In his text The idea of a journey from 1969, he said: "The idea
of a journey is common to all my work. It is the idea of art as mental journey,
discovering new areas for exploration. Since 1963, my paintings have included
attributes of a journey: parcels, bags, suitcases, rucksacks, people constantly
on the road... I perform happenings with those motifs ..."
Tadeusz Kantor - painter-plotter often abandoned painting, approaching its
almost total negation. Everything hangs by a thread. In his text
Cafe Europe of 1990, Kantor wrote: "And then: 1973. The exhibition
Everything hangs by a thread. Where the subject of the painting was
what had been thrown outside the painting and was barely relevant".
In an interview with Wieslaw Borowski, conducted in 1974, he said: "In
that series, Everything hangs by a thread, I perform certain manipulations
on the canvas; however, it is not formal manipulation. The canvas is indeed
material, but what I do is ridiculing canvas, and ridicule always assumes
emotional involvement."
Besides those negations of painting, the exhibition also includes works
from the opposite end of the spectrum: rich, symbolic, material, expressive
paintings, full of reflection on man and objects, rational and emotional
at the same time. These are the paintings from the series Emballaged
Figures. An example of reflection on that special object that is painted
canvas - a representation, but with its own size and weight, its material
and fragility. The reflection on a picture as a requisite of the interior
it is placed in, picture as a requisite of a museum, gallery, exhibition,
determines the way it is painted, made, exhibited. This is Kantor's
argument in the discussion concerning the manner of a being of the
fruits of an artist's work - being a painting, art, or the avant-garde.
Exemplars of another works-series-action presented at our exhibition - Multipart
(multiplication plus participation), were shown by Kantor in 1970 at
the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, and postulated the rejection of the uniqueness
of the work (multiplication) and overcoming the artist's exclusive responsibility
for the work (participation of others in the "completing" of the
work). Kantor remarked on this in his text Cafe Europe: "And then:
the year 1970. The exhibition of identical pictures with an umbrella. They
were to acquire their individual character only after being completed by
their purchasers. All the pictures were bought on the first day of the show.
After a year there was an exhibition of works of the purchasers-artists.
Not my works. I had only provided the initial stimulus - the umbrella."
The last group of Kantor's works prominently represented in the collection
held and shown here in Lodz - is the set of paintings After This,
Nothing, Again. They contain the experience of their author's life-time
- his life in art. The paintings are overcrowded, rich, waiting for a further
solution. "In this splendid crush, there could be no rules or dictates
of the 'mass' avant-garde", wrote Kantor in Cafe Europe, referring
to the exhibition After This, Nothing, Again, from 1981. He went
on to say: "I was again accosted by the Napoleonic soldier from Goya's
painting. A figure came out of the painting and it turned out to be only
fiction...". Eclecticism as intensified fiction made for the closer
contact with reality, of which art is only one of elements.
After this, nothing, again? I'll never come back here again?
Kantor claimed that he painted out of habit, but was making drawings with
passion, "altruistically". He was saying farewell to painting
and then returning to it. The artist's unceasing involvement with painting
and theatre, "life in a triangle", "cohabitation" with
them, found expression in the spectacle Today is My Birthday - the
artistic legacy, "personal statement" of the artist. Kantor's
Great Testament, like the 15th century Testament of Francois
Villon (based on the instinctive feel of reality and evoked by Kantor for
that reason), looks through reality. It is spoken "without shame"
as the author of The Dead Class put it. It remains a mystery, which
we should preserve.
"And now this exhibition. Well ...accrochage, vernissage. The only
hope is the audience. To have the audience come to my theatre, Cricot and
say: He hasn't changed! He's always the same!", wrote Tadeusz Kantor
in Cafe Europe.
Jaromir Jedlinski, October 1995
* The fragments of Tadeusz Kantor's texts quoted here maintain the original
punctuation, but the versification has been simplified in some cases.
INTRODUCTION -
WORKS -
NOTES -
GUESTBOOK
