The »animator of the blue line«: that is what Edward Krasinski most liked to call himself. In 1969, completely by chance, Krasinski received the present of a roll of blue Scotch tape from Sweden, supposedly from a militiaman. And, with this tape, he carried out his first »territorial markings« at a height of 130 centimetres. Because it was intuitively a good height, he retained it for his whole artistic career. »This strip has a meaning for me when it exists, but isn’t exhibited, but just noticed. It de-masks the reality of that which it is stuck on.«
Which strip has more staying power: the 8.7-centimetre broad strip of the well-known concept artist Daniel Buren, or the 19-millimetre narrow strip of Edward Krasinski? One feels remotely reminded of the parable by Pliny, who relates how the two artists Protogenes and Apelles came to blows on Rhodes over the thickness of a line …
Buren and Krasinski: this comparison does not really aim to contrast Eastern art and Western art or emphasise the supposed superiority of the latter, as the two artists met up in 1970 at the opening of an exhibition by Daniel Buren in the Yvon Lamber gallery. Edward Krasinski was introduced to the French artist, and they built up a close relationship that even went so far that Krasinski put up his blue strips at the same time in the inner courtyard of the Musée d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris, on the trees and in the gallery quarter on the Left Bank, arousing the ire of gallery owners who thought this »partisan action« (Krasinski) desecrated this place of art and notified the police.

How does a place become a place for art? How do viewers change art? Does art change the viewers? What does s/he really see, what does s/he perceive, what not? What role does the artist take on in the process, what role should s/he not take on at any price? These and similar questions preoccupied a small group of critics and artists (among them Edward Krasinski) in Warsaw in the mid-sixties, which led to the foundation of the now legendary Galeria Foksal.
Since its inception, the Generali Foundation has devoted its energy to the study and collection of art from the sixties and seventies, receiving considerable international recognition for its efforts. The retrospective of Edward Krasinski is a first, inasmuch as former geographical and mental borders have been overcome and it is the first retrospective of an artist from a post-communist country to take place in the exhibition spaces of the Generali Foundation.

The strength of this exhibition lies partly in the preparatory work, the research and obsessive examination of the Polish neo-avant-garde, which was substantially supported by a young generation of Polish art historians (including Joanna Mytkowska and Andrzej Prywara), who, while reappraising the history of the Galeria Foksal, had founded the Fundacja Galerij Foksal. And, of course, in its interviews with those involved at the time, including above all one of the Foksal founders, art historian Anka Ptaszkowska, as well as Wieslaw Borowski and Marius Tchorek (also Foksal), who have saved valuable memories of that time for today.

The sometimes exact replications of various important exhibitions or work complexes from the oeuvre of Edward Krasinski is what gives the Vienna exhibition its substantiality and presence. Representing this life work from nearly four decades demands concentration and selection. At the same time, this project contains an element of danger in view of our present-day manner of reception: seeing Krasinski, who devoted so much loving attention to the ephemeral, the trivial, the playful, as a minimalist and constructivist, or as a sculptor who was primarily interested in the auratic realisation of his art works. But that was exactly what the artist did not want at all. He was socialised in the sixties, when a certain radicalism broke up the conventional formal vocabulary and habits of reception, and the »Werkbegriff« was fundamentally called into question.1 Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeus Kantor and their radicalisation of absurd theatre were there, the great constructivist tradition of the pre-war years, the works of people like Kobro and Strzemi?ski were still present and formed a context from which Krasinski’s work moved away.
Krasinski himself maintains that he has his roots in pseudo-surrealism, inspired by Cracowian black humour, that he is an emotional person who hates beauty and art works too, in contrast with his highly regarded friend, the famous constructivist Henry Stazewski, with whom he shared an apartment and studio in a late modernist apartment building in Warsaw for twenty years until the latter’s death.

After Stazewski’s decease, Krasinski put on a »Hommage à Henryk Stazewski« in Galeria Foksal in 1989, for which he employed a post-modern vocabulary, quotes. The artist reconstructed the apartment in the form of a photographic environment using a collection of directly cited elements or elements reproduced at original size (for example, a three-dimensional photographic model of Stazewski’s book shelf, a photo of the skyline of the city and four of Krasinski’s »Axonometries«), all with a continuous blue strip stuck on them. These encapsulated the artist’s memories of the years they had spent together. This central work is located in the main room of the entrance hall of the Generali Foundation. In 1970, Krasinski became the first conceptualist of Poland. Against his will – it was not deliberate conceptualism, but occurred with the intention of rescuing the honour of the Polish situation. At the invitation of the Tokyo Biennial, his contribution, sculptures made of blue elastic bands (this exhibition item was presented at the Generali, and is one of the nicest rooms to be replicated), was sent by freighter to Tokyo, and would have come too late for the opening, something the Japanese secret service found out in advance. The artist thereupon sent a telegram to the curators before the opening with exact instructions on how to proceed. This telegram and the sketches for the planned exhibit are also to be found in this retrospective. Krasinski sent the word »blue« 5,000 times by telex with the instruction to throw the strip of paper onto a pedestal. The photographer Eustachy Kossakoski succeeded in throwing some light on the not so visible actions of Krasinski, which the artist liked to entitle »happenings«.2 And Kossakowski did so for years. We owe it to his photographs, whose existence is invaluable, that we can still see in this exhibition Krasinski’s ephemeral traces and playful insubstantialities. They are photographs from Kossakowski’s estate. He not only captured the »happenings«, but also the figure of his subject, Krasinski, in a brilliant manner.

One of the most successful photo series is indubitably the one showing Krasinski’s in the midst of tangled leads. This studio action for the Foksal gallery was supplemented by a published leaflet requesting the audience to notify the gallery in writing, by telephone or by telegram if someone found the end of the lead. The private photo sessions from Zalesie can also be seen here for the first time in this comprehensive form. they show the experimental spatial interventions with the new material using female models, all known to the artist, including his little daughter, Paula. The blue adhesive tape is at about chest height on the bodies of the female figures and forms the continuation of the natural or architectural surroundings; sometimes the tape is held horizontally in the model’s hands.
This retrospective underlines once more the central position held by Edward Krasinski’s works within European art of the sixties and seventies, as well as their power: to express the effects of motion in space sculpturally and conceptually, to multiply those visual paradoxes, and to use illusionism to reveal the complexity and heterogeneity of the direct environment.

Generali Foundation, 12 May to 27 August 2006

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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