Josef Dabernig returned to Krakow with an overview of his work from the nineties until the present day. One can indeed say »returned«, as we all remember his first prolonged stay here over ten years ago, and the beginning of his research into the Polish post-communist cultural landscape. Dabernig’s fascination with the communist district of Nowa Huta was proverbial. The anecdote about him attending a match played by the Kracovian premiership football team »Wisla« and being taken for a »Western expert« (mainly because he could not believe that these crap players were professionals) entertained the local art scene for a long time.
From today’s perspective, this »genius loci« aspect of his art remains important, but has given way to a more universal message. The Krakow exhibition is, in this sense, a general statement about 20th-century utopias, their heritage and their afterlife. In between the photos of a housing estate in Bratislava and a football stadium in Vilnius that are shown in Bunkier Sztuki, Dabernig shows us fragments of the bigger picture.
This picture is based on the decentralized narrative of the metropolitan flâneur, who enters the world of provincial or marginal otherness and examines it. Instead of giving it careful scrutiny, he is fascinated by this world, so different than his own, and perceives the otherness as a social fact, based on architecture, space, dress and various commodities. Josef Dabernig stages his narrative hero as a representative of the »West« entering the realm of the strange and grotesque »East« - a caricature of his own world, but also a universe with a different axiology, which he tries to understand and benefit from. At the same time, the dividing lines are not all that clear-cut. In the film »Wars«, absurdity and irony rule. Instead of giving us a panoptical gaze, the eye of the camera is sympathetic towards the staff of the restaurant car in the Polish train and their everyday rituals. In Dabernig’s art, the otherness of the »East« is not perceived as a given fact, but rather as a »construct«, and as such is given a tongue-in-cheek treatment. It is always tempting to see it in the context of the Viennese identity of the protagonists. The Danubian metropolis, which escaped the post-1945 fate of Prague, Budapest and Krakow (cf. the Russian monument in Schwarzenberg Square) by a thin margin, and for long time shared the history of its Eastern neighbours, cannot produce the standard »Western narrative« that we know from elsewhere. When portraying the »East«, Dabernig might actually be saying much more about the Western gaze and its search for its own self-confirmation among the ruins of the Eastern Bloc.
The Krakow exhibition laid the emphasis on the second crucial aspect of Josef Dabernig’s art, that of geometry and systems. First of all, it is the geometry of 20th- century grand narratives and their hopes of constructing a »brave new world«. Today they are falling apart. The geometry is not entirely perfect, something is missing – the proportions are slightly wrong, the horizontal lines are not really horizontal, not many right angles are truly exact. This is the story of the inability to reach utopian perfection, visualized most strikingly in public arenas where a feeling of community was to be celebrated. This is why the metaphorical use of the football stadium is so appropriate, as it turns into the constructivist equivalent of Benjaminian »passages«, with their high hopes and subsequent failures. Yet these arenas still have the mesmerizing power of being singular spaces – a mixture of ideology, architecture and history.
Dabernig’s geometry unveils his careful investigation of the world-as-construction, where every detail of the necessary calculations might reveal the hidden character of the system. The list of petrol prices in Austria, Italy, Slovakia and Poland illustrates not only the sudden fluctuations of the mathematical sequences, but also the bizarre economics of European internal borderlines. The photo series showing enormous high-rises in Petrzalka is an attempt to show the totalitarian essence of the communist era and its effects on town planning. But Dabernig does not show contempt for geometry; instead, he writes his own theorem about its use. It is a geometry that is not built on the destruction of pre-existing external frameworks, but becomes involved in a dialogue with them. The architectural designs shown in Bunkier Sztuki, particularly those made for the Corderie at the 2003 Venice Biennale, illustrate this kind of dialogue. The consequent beauty emerges not from a pre-ordered sense of proportions but from the very act of construction. In this sense, Josef Dabernig’s art might be considered a eulogy of geometry as a provocative intervention in chaotic space and not as a dominant master-narrative of the universe.
Looking at the handwritten books, the final chapter of the Krakow show, one was able to see how meditative Josef Dabernig’s art is. Despite all its wit, suspense and playfulness, it is predominantly about the revival of the avant-garde project, conscious of its failures but contemplating the possible contemporary applications of its genuine creativity.