The common space is darkness – camera obscura – a dark chamber, a dark king’s apartment. This leads us to photography or, in other words, through the space of photography to the astray of performance documentation. We refer to one black and white photograph from the collection of the National Museum in Lublin and tell the story of this important performance. Performance, appearance, deformance, reformance, deformance, semi-formance, behavioural actions, con-cepts, traditional forms, hybrid forms, notes, sketches, diagrams, words, concrete works, d eclarative actions, speeches – in the face of emptiness, in the face of lack, in the face of excess, in the face of the pressure of triviality, in the face of the pressure of history, etc. – in confrontation with the triumph of performance, in the face of lack, in the face of excess, in the face of the pressure of triviality, in the face of the pressure of history, etc. – in confrontation with triumph.
Before us lies yet another futile attempt – doomed to failure – to ‘understand’ performance. Another attempt to dissect the phenomenon into its first factors, although we never know which are the first. We examine the components extract-ed from the process in an exceptional context, in an exceptional place. We study process by process, space by space, brain by brain. We are faced with questions and answers, including unanswered questions. We go back to the primer to fail, to ‘lay out’ on the primer, 100% failure.
It would be best to work on it somewhere else e.g. in the forest, in a meadow, in the desert, by the sea, in the mountains, on an island, on a peninsula. Because the artist and the artist always want, need and should be “somewhere else”. We would like to do it in any other imagined space. We have our weaknesses, we are only human, e.g. we are driven by vanity, desire for success, desire for presence, existence and prestige, in a word the National Museum in the palace! What is the point, why are you doing this, someone might ask, if in a moment our planet will perish and so will we all? Doomed to failure, in the face of catastrophe, wars and conflagration, we rekindle our optimism and faith in art, a metadiscursive space, full of hope that truth, goodness and beauty will finally prevail.
Ewa Zarzycka