Page 37 - Art Review

Under the Paving Stones

Warsaw’s surfaces scratched

by Phoebe Blatton

Of mice and men

A wet Sunday morning in September: the annual Warsaw Gallery
Weekend’s ‘VIPs’ (myself included) are gathered for brunch inside the
Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture at Królikarnia – ‘The Rabbit
House’ – a rather cute name for this Palladian palace, which, like much
of ‘historic’ Warsaw, has been razed and rebuilt several times over. Many
in the crowd are in need of rebuilding, hungover from last night’s lavish
party in celebration of the weekend’s exhibitions and events, organised
by 27 participating commercial galleries. It’s a tribute to proud Polish
hospitality that the endless alcohol of the night before seems to feature
just as heavily the morning after. More than anything, however, I find
myself wishing I’d picked up a bread roll and coffee on the way.
Artist Katarzyna Krakowiak, casually dressed in jeans and a sweater,
looks very much part of the crowd but assumes an almost noble air as she
takes up a position before a tall window, looking out upon parkland first
created during the seventeenth century to host rabbit hunts; her perfor-
mance is about to take place, as part of the museum’s current group
exhibition Half-truth: Works by Central and Eastern European Contemporary
Artists from Art Collection Telekom. She holds one hand behind her back,
and in the other a diamond ring, which she raises to the windowpane.
She walks, dragging the diamond across successive windows with an
amplified, teeth-jarring screech as she proceeds through the museum’s
elegant rooms. I am reminded of the adage ‘if these walls could talk’,
although in this case the building seems to scream. We follow Krakowiak
in an uncomfortable cluster, trying not to knock into Piotr Łakomy’s
sculptures, which evoke a spacesuit’s limbs or torso, or the trenchant
Rosetta (2009) sculptures by Ioana Nemes. Afterward I peer at the line
scored in the glass, this faint scar the only vestige of a sonically monu- top Katarzyna Krakowiak’s glass-scoring performance, part of group
mental gesture, as impassive waiters hover with trays of champagne. show Half-truth at the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture
above Inside Edward Krasin´ski’s former studio-apartment,
now known as the Avant-Garde Institute

below Warsaw flat of the author’s uncle
I began my weekend in Warsaw with a fixture of the city’s art
establishment: the studio-apartment of Edward Krasin´ski (1925–2004),
preserved by the Foksal Gallery Foundation as the Avant-Garde Institute,
which he shared with (from 1970) and subsequently inherited from
the pioneering painter of the 1920s and 1930s avant-garde, Henryk
˙
Stazewski (1894–1988). Krasin´ski’s tenure comprises many playful
conceptual interventions that occupy every surface, nook and cranny
in a slow process of entropy (a friend on entering immediately knocks
into a branch stuck between the parquet floor tiles, and is told the
branch would’ve remained uprooted if he hadn’t been able to ‘replant’
it). Faded ersatz mice are frozen mid-scurry across surfaces, and most
famously, Krasin´ski’s continuous line of blue sticky tape bisects everything
in its path at the height of 130cm. With a touch of Polish histrionics,
my friend (an art historian) notes melancholically that the tape has
disintegrated in places since his last visit some years ago.

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