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“Has the cancer of rationalism eaten up your brain? There is an opportu-nity for the lost”! Jea n-Jacques Rousseau proposed t hat we should fi nd t he golden mea ns bet ween t he indi erence of t he or igina l huma n state a nd t he undefeated act iv it y of ou r self-love. T here w as not h ing about t he simple state of utopia of nat u re, a nd w hat w as sign i fica nt w as rat her t he act ive role in work ing out a model of societ y t hat would let us refor m ou r customs a nd re-educate ou r senses. N ever t heless, h is-tor y on ly gives a test imony t hat w henever somet h ing as tech n ica l as model is to be applied, its executors seem to be forget t ing t hat it used to be on ly model, a nd t h is f requent ly opens up t he road to abuse, in flat ion of power, a nd event u-a l ly to regime.

T hen , as if simulta neously, in l ine w it h t he pr inciple of mut ua l it y a nd com-plementa r it y of nat u re, some w here on t he per ipher y t he ger m of a not her force is budding: a lter nat ive a nd dy na m ic, f r ivolous a nd unta med, chaot ic a nd incor-rect . A force t hat exceeds t he l im itat ions of models or com ma nds, as it precedes a nd t ra nsgresses t hem . Gush ing here is t he spr ing of rebel l ion , a pre-ex pressive element t hat w ill oppose t he set st r uct u re of power. T h is rebel l ion , resista nce, a nd passion of f reedom is t he act ive energy. T h is is t he hea r t of counter-cult u re a nd t he l ife inspi r ing breat h of t he great G oddess E r is.

T he O ra nge A lter nat ive points open ly to its inspi rat ion in D ada ism a nd su r-rea l ism . W it h its a nt i-st r uct u ra l a nd a nt i-rat iona l (or su r rat iona l in t he case of M a rcel D ucha mp) energy of t he element , has f requent ly prov ided t he source of t he contempora r y polit ica l happen ing. F rom t he pre-w a r ava nt-ga rde it took over t he poet ic of laughter, un lim ited f reedom in ex pression of t houghts, scat h-ing w it , merci less i rony, a nd – obv iously – provocat ion . A ll t hese to at tack in a ny ma n ner possible – t h rough t he absu rd, past iche, grotesque, pa radox – t he da n-gerously a l ienat ing power: of t he reason , of t he socia l st r uct u re, or t he order of nor ms set in stone. T h is precious energy of resista nce t hat t he O ra nge A lter nat ive took over f rom t he D ada ists may not be lack ing, a nd if it ever happened so, peo-ple would t u r n into robots progra m med to somebody else’s w ill, into ex ter na l ly cont rolled mach ines, devoid of w ill a nd devoid of t h in k ing. T herefore, if a nyone feels t hat somet h ing is going t he w rong w ay, he ca n a l w ays reach for .

F u r n ished w it h t he pocket cosmod rome t hat we a l w ays have w it h i n ou r sk ulls, we have exa m ined a ha ndf ul of facts f rom t he border of h istor y of ideas a nd h istor y of a r t to recogn ise t he a rchaeology of t he pa r t icula r phenomenon t hat has ga ined bot h fa me a nd recogn it ion under t he na me of t he O ra nge A lter-nat ive. T he colou r w it h t he 255-165-0 ca r r ies a n act ivat ion potent ia l, a nd laughter ca n t r igger a revolut ion .

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, or “Our appeal for the world to lie down in a dream, and the dream in the world. Let ever yone of you know that we will not let anyone cheat us easily.”The leading principle of action art is the movement of thinking that opposes the structure. This brings it close to the spirit of counterculture, present – with-out respect to time and place – whether this is the 1967 Summer of Love in Cal-ifornia, or May 1968 in Paris, or Wroc!aw 1988. And (even though it is worth-while) one does not need to know Richard Schechner to know that “the street is the stage”, nor Sir Ralf Dahrendorf or Erving Go"man to have the feeling that the main principle of explaining social facts today is their theatrical quality and value of participation in a social Spectacle. Spectacle here is a metaphor of ex-istence, much like Game or Dream. What is the truth and what an appearance, what is reality and what is dream? Following the surreal fusion of dream and wakefulness into a single surreality, one does not need to answer this dualistic question any more. If we only learn to dream consciously. “Down with symme-try! Long live free imagination!” We participate in this Spectacle, whatever its valuation, and we can participate in its creation, creating new situations, other-wise it is the Spectacle that will “do” us. The popular slogan “the street belongs to us” assumed a more tangible form in the discourse of British activists: “What the Parliament did, the Street can undo”. Possibly, to add quoting Konopnicka, “because whether you want it or not, there are dwarves in the world”.

The “lesson” of #$#$ taught through the mediation of the Orange Alter-native teaches that action may be art, in which case it acquires higher e%-ciency, independent from the place where the action takes place – whether in &widnicka Street or in front of the White House, the Embassy of Belarus, and in Tiananmen Square; during the Pride Parade, and at the “Fascism shall not pass” rally, during the operation Follow the W hite Rabbit in Katowice and at Halloween in New York. Whatever the scale of the operation and its precise course, what is of key importance is the very manifestation of the transgressi-ve energy of life, the joyful creative element that does not tolerate limitations. The art of action, the unmediated and direct artistic operation is the expres-sion of this very element.

Strangely enough, civic movements and artistic movements cannot often be separated in a simple way. As Johan Huizinga, a classic scholar in the field of anthropology argues, play is the source of culture. It was so that something extraordinary began from having fun together in a café, from an independent newsletter, and from happenings of the Movement of the New Culture.' The Or-ange Alternative is therefore to be analysed not as an art or creative activity, nor as a political or civic movement, but rather in the context of art, and in the con-text of politics. To quote the thinker and performer Jan &widzi(ski, author of

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the theory of contextualism, in a film devoted to action art: “In certain context, every type of action is a political.”!

!"# $%! &' ()%#*! $*!)&+,, or “the fox, the tiger, the badger, the bear. Revolutionary Activist, poisonous toadstools, goldfish”Action art is not an invention of the avant-garde, and may be derived from the ac-tions of Diogenes from the barrel, Chinese Taoist calligraphers, and the shaman practices originating in traditional cultures from all over the globe. It is the source performance of life acted to the glory of the fullness of being. This creative act, conceived as an event, is something at the same time very easy and very di"-cult. Much like performance, action art is “an opening of art to the everyday life” (Dziamski), art-life (Goldberg), and “fulfilled action” (Grotowski).#

To examine the happenings of the Orange Alternative in the context of art, it is necessary to define the semantic field. Usually, certain simplifications are made – concessions mostly to art history as a science – which define the actions performed in the context of art into types and subtypes, due to their form and nature. This allows us to talk about happening, anti-happening, performance, body-art, demonstration, and very many others, remembering that the so-called borders between the arts (perceived usually as formal categories of the media of communication) are fluid and defined primarily by the context. It is the context that allows identification of the various forms of human activity, and specifical-ly to di$erentiate between arts of corresponding formal character (why not per-formance, monodrama, and dance). Each of the notions has its own history and a variety of semantic entanglements. Nevertheless, action art, which I define as

“the art of direct action” allows attention focus on uniqueness of every human action: its dynamic character, both internally and in its deep philosophical as-sumptions. This approach is performative, spectacular, and theatrical, in the same sense in which theatron originates from the action of seeing.% It is also the sensi-tivity to the praxis, to the real multilevel e$ect, as if it would be followed by cer-tain dissatisfaction with the verbal or declarative level, or withthe idea carried above life lacking of the quality that is provided by embodiment.

It also used to be assumed that, as a life-art, performance has its modern 20th-century roots in the Petersburg constructivist Stray Dog Café, in the fu-turistic Synthesis Theatre, and in the &'&' actions in Zürich, Berlin, Paris, and New York. To understand the deep grounds of the connections between Dada-ism and the socially involved alternative artistic movements, one needs to take into account the conclusions on the subject that have been worked out by the an-thropology of art, and perceive the broad consequences of today’s dadaist activ-ity as an influential pre-counterculture, anti-war movement and as involved in far-going intellectual transformations.( And because &'&' – perceived somewhat

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more broadly than just a phenomenon in the history of art – is something ex-tremely significant for the subject of Orange Alternative that we are tackling, let us follow the principle ab Iove principium and move to !"!" immediately to re-call its origins.

!"#$%&', or “Even Lenin’s novels are no match for a painting”“All artistic revolutions begin in cafés,” Tadeusz Kantor used to say. It was also in this way that – in well known circumstances – the !"!" movement originat-ed in Zürich in 1916. The multinational group of artists, predominantly poets and painters, inaugurated the activity of a fellowship of such profound signifi-cance for the development of culture of 20th century (and possibly also for 21st century) that this city of banks, watches, and Lenin may today boast the history of a small yet influential café known as Cabaret Voltaire. We can only speculate whether it was the name of the place that was to be considered critical towards the rationalism presented by the author of L’Ingénu, or was it to make references to the pitiless and mocking method of animating the intellect and spirit that this dramatist worked out and applied to expose the hypocritical “normality”.

Nonetheless, the Dadaist launched by Tristan Tzara wanted from its begin-ning to be abnormal and anti-rationalist, and to provoke actively and directly. The definition of art that the dominant milieu of pretentious aesthetes used was considered absurd and idiotic in the group gathered at the Cabaret Voltaire, and all the theories of art and attempts at explaining artistic action were considered uninteresting and antiquated. Nothing was left. Times of anti-art were proc-laimed, as well as attitude of opposing all generally accepted opinions, equally expert superstitions and popular superstitions. The function that art used to play earlier was entirely lost.# Such circumstances and this conviction needed con-frontation. The Dadaist happeners believed that art has become solely an aes-thetic pleasure based on arbitrary and unjust judgement of taste, which led to a situation in which significant for the reception of art was only admiration, and thinking was no longer necessary at all.

For the Dadaists, the only answer to this callousness of the alleged “ sensitive” hard-headed people was the scandal. The method for achieving it was trans-gression of customary norms, canons in artistic – in painting and sculpture, and non-artistic – in life; through spontaneous direct action, a new and specifical-ly Dadaist form of art. The intolerable young provocateurs – activists and art-ists altogether – were dangerous for every pre-established public order. And if that order proved to be based on hypocrisy and duplicity, the fears of its guard-ians were most justified. The group formed under the !"!" banner craved for enlivening of the spirit and the intellect. Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hen-nings, Jean Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Richter, were later joined by

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others, including Max Ernst, Man Ray, the later “pope of surrealism” André Bre-ton, and possibly the most radical of them – Marcel Duchamp. They gatecrashed events and pulled the legs of respectable professors, aged ladies, and perfectly groomed youngsters. They provoked intellectually with their eccentric beha-viour, not with aggression. When they organised an exhibition, you would enter it through the toilets, to prevent all possibilities of the “temple of art” attitude, in its institutional form. Before they were considered entartete Kunst (a degrad-ed art) in the Third Reich, Dadaists exhibited pigs in Nazi uniforms in Munich, to comment upon the political situation and provide the audience with a pretext to a serious and immediate consideration who really are the politicians govern-ing them. At the same time they painted moustaches on inviolable monuments of culture.

This avant-garde approach of a!ecting the spectator with the form as well as with the content of the message, with intelectual and sensual guerrilla, was the inseparable companion of the "#"# movement and later of surrealists, but its origin were in "#"#. At numerous exhibitions and meetings, in which the space of the gallery was to be transformed into di!erent world, the openings were always happenings avant la lettre. People dressed as fantastic creatures were walking the halls, naked women covered with seafood lolled on the tables, and the musical landscape was constructed of pre-noise music of unidentified me-tallic beats. The modernist desire for a future change, which an artistic action may bring about, was broken with another – performative and synchronous ef-fect. The experience itself was becoming significant, and so was the event, and its transitory aspect, which Breton later named acte gratuit – a unbiased act, gen-erated from the inside. Externally, it triggered the desire for cognition, encou-raged expectation of what the organisers were going to do this time. Would this mean anything, would they say anything, or maybe they were going to dance and sing phrases from Ubu Roi and play with words previously cut out from a news-paper and randomly draw them from a hat stolen from the unknown gentleman. In one of these exhibitions, the surrealist painter Max Ernst added an axe to his sculpture, believing that if his art somehow hit the spectator, the spectatot should also be able to hit it, so as to become united with the sculpture into a sin-gle work in the wonderful act of creative destruction.$

!"#$%&", or “Even a single policeman in the street is a work of art”As it proved later, of key importance for the transformations of Dadaism and its further development was the person of Marcel Duchamp. Following the great succès de scandale in France with the painting Nude Descending a Staircase, con-sidered a mockery of Cubism, the artist made the famous “Duchamp’s gesture” in 1915. To knock the spectators out from the thoughtless and conservative

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intellectual fixation and to show the limitations of the recipients, Duchamp proposed to the New York exhibition Armory Show a porcelain urinal, which he entitled Fountain.

Much like the earlier Nude, this work by Duchamp was also rejected, yet an intriguing discussion broke out around it, which was much more interesting that the artefact itself. It was not so much the publicity of the scandal (although we do not neglect it),! but rather the agitation that produced the rhizomatic ef-fect. Duchamp’s gesture could have been polysemantic, depending on the re-cipients. It could turn the attention to the social role of the person traditional-ly defined as the artist, to its semidivine power, but also to everything else that was beyond the artist and what manifested in the mind of the spectator. It was a surreal e"ect, active at the level of imagination. Through provocation, it could disclose the superstitions of the recipient himself, his opinions about the sta-tus of a work of art, artist and finally with all what was connected to the dom-inant dualism of high and low culture. He could draw attention to the institu-tion of the gallery, to the curators, and the criteria for the selection of works for exhibitions, and to their hidden assumptions and limitations. It was a change of focus – from what is aesthetic and retinal, to what is intellectual and spiritual. In this case – inversely proportional to the ordinary character of the object itself. The Fountain was also the first ready-made in history, an object of everyday life, which in certain circumstances becomes a work of art by the force of a gesture (today this gesture can be construed as a contextual shift, thanks to the writings of #widzi$ski). Or, possibly, one should say: it had been a work of art even ear-lier, even though nobody noticed. The slogan of the Orange Alternative “Even a single policeman in the Street is a work of art” makes a significant contributi-on to Duchamp’s gesture.

After Duchamp’s arrival in the %&', his art found fertile ground. Some were still only shocked, but others began to take a closer look, and interpret what it was actually all about. The New York ('(' began to develop, and so did its influ-ence on art in the United States. And again, it became clear what a culture-form-ing role can be played by these insubordinate European artists. Even though ex-ternally, Duchamp himself dressed like a proper European gentleman, he was nevertheless one of the most radical intellectual revolutionaries. He did not sport green hair as Baudelaire did, nor walked an anteater on a leash like Dalí. But the answer to his presence in the United States came from the American “angry young men”, unsatisfied with the state of the art and world, who did not hesitate to reach for new, risky experiments in the search for the way out from the im-passe. They were Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage.

The activity of Cage (born in 1912) was of key importance for the establishing of happening as an artform. First, in 1948, together with Merce, Cunningham,

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and Willem de Kooning, he worked on a pre-happening production of The Raft of the Medusa to the music of Erik Sati. Later, in 1952 he performed the action Theater Piece No. 1, which with time was considered the world’s first happening. Towards the end of the 1950s, in classes in “experimental composition”, Cage together with his students from the New School examined action art as a form of art that not only combined other media, but was also integrated with life and with the process that a person operating in a given situation as an artist expe-riences himself.

!"##$%&%', or “You know well that Imagination is an unlimited world”In 1957, at a spring picnic at his friend’s, Allan Kaprow (born in 1927), a student of Cage’s from Black Mountain College, coined a term “happening”, and two years later, i.e. in 1959, he performed the first operation using that notion in New York. It was remembered as 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, while Kaprow’s book Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, published by Abrams in 1966, described his in-vention and introduced other new forms in art, besides the happening, that have survived to this day. Kaprow wrote, “The term ‘happening’ refers to an art form related to theatre, in that it is performed in a given time and space. Its structure and content are logical extensions of environment’s influence.” And: ‘The term ‘environment’ refers to an art form that fills an entire room (or outdoor space) surrounding the visitor and consisting of any materials whatsoever, including lights, sounds and colour.”!"

Following this and other experiments of Cage and Kaprow, and a group of artists close to them, the neo-Dadaist movement known as Fluxus was born. O#cially, the first concert of Fluxus was organised in Wiesbaden in 1962, with the participation of, among others, John Cage, George Brecht, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostel, and many other intermedia artists (term coined by Higgins) combining experimental music and concrete poetry with hap-pening and action. George Maciunas created the name Fluxus to define move-ment, flow, and life in opposition to stagnation, fossilisation, and deadness of mental structures.

One cannot ignore the fact that at the same time when Kaprow “invented” the happening, that is in 1957, the Situationist International was established in France; its initiators, Guy Debord (born in 1931) and Ivan Chtcheglov (born in 1933), began to apply art as a political tool and embraced the neo-Dadaist tactic of shock and cultural sabotage. It was a di$erent form of social activism, refer-ring to the modern anarchism and moving freely in the area of the art of life.

Another 20th-century source of action art is the gesture in action painting of Jackson Pollock (born in 1912) and his abstractionist expressionism. Even in the early 1940s, Pollock covered the canvas by pouring or dripping paint on it in

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a one-man dance with the painting matter. He became acquainted with surreal-ism and its ideas by the gallery that exhibited his works, and by his wife, the in-fluential artist Lee Krasner. On the continent, gesture painting was termed in-formel, a name coined by Georges Mathieu in 1945. Another name of this type of painting, originating from the French word for a stain, is tachisme.

In Poland, tachisme was practised by Tadeusz Kantor (born in 1915), who “went to the hells of his unconcious”!! through informel painting, treated more as a form of self-cognition than an expression of the person of the artist. Later, Kantor began to bring informel into the theatre, using this way to paint costumes and building a philosophy of new art. “Art annexes life”, he would say. In fact it was an opening to the factor of chance, disclosing secret senses and the unor-dered, dark side of reality, in which structures are crystallised from chaos, and later become again dissolved into chaos.

1965 was the year of Cricotage, the first happening in Poland that ended in a scandal and dismissal of the gallery’s director. Even though the intentions of the artists were not political, the Communist authorities probably had to under-stand Cricotage as aiming against the public order, incomprehensible for inter-pretation, and moving, ergo dangerous to the stability of the system. The actions that the happening was composed of (cutting hair, shaving, eating pasta, etc.) were everyday activities transferred into the scene of artists café, taken out from their natural context and cast into the context of art, where they acquired new, accidental, and unexpectable meanings.

Kantor’s happenings, besides the “happening theatre” that he ran at the time, reinforced this medium in Poland. The photographs taken by Eustachy Kossa-kowski at the Panoramic Sea Happening in Osieki in August 1967 became an icon of these actions. The photograph shows a figure dressed as an orchestra con-ductor standing on a rostrum going into the sea, with spectators behind him, waves of the element in front of him, and baton in hand. The constituent events of the Panoramic happening was The Raft of the Medusa based on Théodore Géri-cault, which – much like Cage and Sati’s spectacle – made reference to the fa-mous romantic painting. This “first ever large-scale attempt by any painter to document a contemporary political scandal”!" was reconstructed on the Baltic beach and played out by a group of happeners in the presence of around 1000 spectators. The very scene presented in the painting by Géricault that provid-ed the grounds for the action was connected to a tragic events from 1816, when during the sea disaster of the Medusa, the o#cers (i.e. authorities) escaped in lifeboats, leaving the passengers in the grips of death. They nevertheless built a raft of their own accord, but out of the one hundred and fifty passengers, only fifteen remained alive to testify to the truth. While painting, Géricault invited his friends, including Eugène Delacroix, to be his models.

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Kantor followed a similar path. In this way, which we find of double signifi-cance, the Raft of the Medusa happening initiated the performance activity of one of the most eminent representatives of action art in Poland – Jerzy Bere! (born in 1930), a Krakow sculptor and hippie. In the context of actions which we are discussing, Bere!’s manifestations are rather to be associated with the non-ironic approach, with their character being usually full of solemnity, as is emphasised in the titles including The Mass, The Oracle, The Prophecy, reminding of priest-ly, shamanistic, and magic actions. The artist usually performs them naked, em-phasising in this way his sincerity, weaponlessness, and openness of intention. Bere!’s nakedness is connected to the nakedness of the hippies, yet there is a dif-ference of e"ect. Similarly di"erent is the nakedness of Ewa Partum from the fa-mous photograph, in which she is standing in front of a uniformed police woman “armed” in clothes. And even though parallels are tempting, they need not be twisted – action art is ruled by the logic of di"erence as well as by the logic of similarity. Nakedness may be a means of revealing the fact that it is “the emper-or who is naked”. Much like the dwarf’s cap may show that the power held by force is in fact devoid of reality.

!"#$%&'#() #* &+! +,--!('(., or “Darwin was a biologist and surrealist”The dwarf that migrated from Paracelsus’s magic to the realm of collective imag-ination was capable of leaping from the world of fairytales into the area of polit-ical arts. The genealogy of the Dutch Provos movement and the Dwarven Party suggests that the beginning occurred when the Dada-inspired Dutch countercul-tural artist Robert Jasper Grootveld organised street happenings against smok-ing tobacco in June 1964. His anti-smoking protests must have been so power-ful and formally attractive that two hippie groups, also enthusiastic about street demonstrations and inspired by what Grootveld was doing, began to collabo-rate with each other. These were groups of pacifists and anarchists gathered together by Roel van Duijn, who joined their forces to protest jointly against war, especially nuclear. The movement based its philosophy on Dadaist kernel and its ideas on pacifism and anarchism; in questions of customs it referred to Marquis de Sade as a crucial thinker for the social theory of non-repressive cul-ture formulated at the time by Herbert Marcuse. The term “Provo”, from which the name of the movement originated, was coined by Wouter Buikhuisen, who used it in his doctoral dissertation in 1965, where the term “Provos” defined the “young troublemakers”. In 1967, “performing a self-provocation”, Provo dis-banded, and – to continue the actions of the unconventional activists – Roel van Duijn started another formation – the Dwarven Party. This, as we know, directly inspired the Orange Alternative. It also gave the Alternative its formal grounds: the orange colour, the pointed dwarven cap, and the happening.

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As has already been said, happening is one of the forms of art of direct actions, which usually involve the presence of the performer with his corporality being felt by the spectators and co-participants. Possibly, it is the question of presence that is one of the reasons for the great e!ciency of the actions of the Orange Alternative, its popularity and influence on actual political change in Poland."# With my own person, I “stand up” to manifest something, with my very exist-ence in a given place and time I speak out, I “stand up for” something or against something. This is an e$ect that is primarily performative. For the real presence to be possible – to quote Bere% the artist of manifestations – it is necessary to get to know the existing reality, preceding the act of carrying out the given perform-ance, and the creation of an internal “report from that reality”."& In the case of the Alternative, sometimes it was just the participation in the happening that created a possibility of making such a report from reality by its participants, co-participants, and the audience. As an action in the context of art, the happen-ing was beyond the limits of interpretations controlled by the communist sys-tem, and therefore developed a distance necessary for free interpretation. Street actions involving large groups of people in one joyful event gave the co-par-ticipants an opportunity to feel that reality and to break the fear of repression. Sometimes the border of power and authority was defined directly by the end of the police baton and the range of the police water cannon. Yet the very expe-rience of joint participation in – as the Orange called it – Karnawa! RIO-Botnic-zy (a play on words with robotniczy meaning “workers’”, and Rio, the capital of the carnival; translator’s note) was to reinforce the need for freedom and inde-pendence. What comes to mind is the question asked by Miros'aw P(czak, who must have been the first to show the Orange Alternative in the anthropological context: “Can a revolt be a celebration?”")

Following the history of the happening, which in the first period of its existence was primarily focused on the cognition and secondly on the e$ect, the Orange happening provided an opportunity to see how far one could go with the com-munist authorities, and at the same time to what degree the minds of the pas-sers-by – fellow citizens in the shared police state – were captive or free. From the beginning of the happening, the need to experience the reality, the need to examine the border between fiction and reality was linked with the sense of a crisis of this reality."* Frequently, the happening first served to detect the cri-sis and then to overcome it.

The happenings performed in the 1980s by Major and friends di$er from the actions of other purely artistic groups (as the Academy of Movement) and from the operations undertaken by individual artists using an event or perform-ance for expression and communication. To perceive how the context of the his-tory of Polish and global action art can expand our understanding of it, one needs

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to plunge into the fascinating tale of discoveries made by independent artists, their adventures, struggles and choices. And first of all, to understand the logic that gave birth to both Dadaism, situationists, Kabouters (dwarves), the Move-ment for New Culture, and the Gallery of Manic Actions of the Orange Alterna-tive from !ód".

!"#$%, or “Under the sun. Even a dried-up insect enjoys itself.”The word #$#$ that the artists of the Cabaret Voltaire chose for the definition of the movement means “yes, yes” in Russian, while in Romanian it is “no, no”. The logic of the happening projects of the Alternative seems to be simple, yet it similarly remains a paradox. It is the logic of a proof that is not straightforward, and is also known as an apagogic or Socratic proof. It is at times referred to as re-ductio ad absurdum: bringing down to opposition. Following the nimble formu-la of Bartek Chaci%ski, who wrote about other Dadaists after Dadaism, the peo-ple of the alternative of the time of globalism, the Yes-men: “instead of beating you up, they ‘yes-yes you up’”.

The logic that corresponds with this is manifested in the context of the dou-ble performance of El&bieta Cie'lar and Emil Cie'lar (born 1934 and 1931 respec-tively) entitled Dobrze/Sta!czyk and produced in 1977. The project made refer-ence to the contrast between the interior and exterior, and alluded to the his-torical painting by Jan Matejko presenting the sad Sta%czyk – Stanis(aw G)ska, the jester of three Polish kings, who was the informal commentator on their ac-tions. After a finished performance, sad Sta%czyk is sitting in an armchair and pondering (tradition says: “over the fate of the Fatherland” but we shall be more general, saying: “that it ain’t good.”). Emil Cie'lar, dressed as Sta%czyk, standing on a ladder with a cartoon speech bubble saying “Dobrze” (which can be trans-lated as “it’s *+”), commented with his performance both on the political and ar-tistic situation, showing the di,erence between meaning and sense in art under the rule of censorship. It also marks the tension between the double game and the deep game of life. The Cie'lars frequently operated on the border of politics of artistic experience, aesthetics, politics, and the bond between ideology and art, creating, for example, a project of an alternative Polish pavilion at the Ven-ice Biennial, where they presented Polish independent art along with the civic proposals of the Workers’ Defence Committee (+*-). Remaining in this climate, but also making references to Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Abbie Ho,man, Guy De-bord, was a number of later works of the Cie'lars, which were presented at their retrospective exhibition at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Warsaw, entitled Anarchia. Repassage. The Cie'lars’ “attempt to exist without the state” remains a significant idea to this day, as it was based on the “desire to create situations favouring intensive coexistence of individuals”../

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A !"##$%$&' ()*+$%(",&, or “We have prepared for your ordered infor-mation extremely perfidious tricks. Do not count on them.”The Orange happeners, much like situationists, Provos and other Dadaists after Dadaism before them, based their operations on the powerful logic of reductio ad absurdum. Besides other creative poetics and logics, it is a distinct and sophisti-cated surrealist technique (sometimes purely subversive, and at times absolutely non-confrontational), recalling a double (and sometimes triple) game. It is a tech-nique which combines involvement and distance, heat and cold, in a very subtle formal combination. Usually behind it stands a very complex creative drama, be-cause even though it seems that such subversive forms are frequently used today, I wouldn’t like to reduce them to pure irony only. In somewhat more refined form, it is successfully used by a number of artists, mostly performers, among whom worth mentioning are Cezary Bodzianowski and Oskar Dawicki, but one could also speak of it in reference to the theatre of Piotr Bikont, and the painting of Andrzej Urbanowicz from the series Letters to Eris.

A similar poetics, making reference to countercultural ways of dealing with censorship applied by the dominant current, can be perceived in the happening techniques of the Orange Alternative, in the texts of its flyers, manifestoes, and the scenarios for its operations. The generally known motif of the absurd that provides food for thought, a model of provocation in thoughts, acquires a more subtle extension in the form of a multi-level message. It is preceded by the phase of disorientation, of profound importance for the e!ciency of the communi-cation itself. Its essence is purposefully mistaking the tracks, being cast into the deep water of meanings, and triggering the message: “cope on your own, read the context”. In the happenings organised by the Orange, the purposeful change of the context and shift of senses may be significant: giving away scarce toilet paper, organisation of the Eve of the October Revolution, and announcing the slogan “Free Isaura”, after the authorities imprisoned another group of oppo-sition activists in the wake of civic protests"#. Today, a significant part of the $%& culture, e!ciently competing with the ideologies of mainstream and structures of the reality of semi-products, thoughtlessness and haste, is based on a similar communication technique.

In a situation of group‘s non-violence principle and the obvious threat from the police, the happenings of the Orange Alternative must have been discussed and prepared in detail. Potential reactions of the authorities and the behav-iour of the security services had to be analysed; the entire dynamic course of the event needed thinking through. Circumstances imposed necessity of find-ing other, artistic, imaginative and intellectual ways of opposing abuse, to find them in the spirit of developing alternative culture which resisted dominant

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model, through actions of performing arts. The major predecessors and inspir-ers operating on the border of neo-avant-garde theatre and anthropological stud-ies were Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwik Flaszen with the idea of active culture.!" This idea and the activity of Grotowski were of profound resonance in the cul-ture-forming milieu of Wroc#aw, known as the “theatrical capital of Poland”, where the founders of the Orange Alternative were studing. $% Grotowski’s work in the middle of the 1980s, co-creating the so-called Second Reform of the The-atre, and inspired by spiritual revolutionaries of the like of Stanislavsky and Artaud, was focused primarily on performance art, yet perceived di&erently than in visual arts. The paratheatrical actions of the Workcenter in Pontedera (focus on intense technical development work, involvement of the entire human being in practices and exercises integrating the person and regaining the body) attracted many and radiated not only to Wroc#aw and Poland but much further afield. The art of Grotowski, “experimenting” with the anthropological theatre in an area totally alternative to the mainstream, was initially formed as a thea-tre laboratory, and later it developed into a paratheatrical ritual workshop with performative actions.

Similarly Bere', one of the most active Krakow hippies and an avowed paci-fist, in his mystical manifestations explored the spiritual territories of develop-ment of the human being and potential of communication with others. Aldona Jaw#owska, the author of the famous Drogi kontrkultury (The Roads of Counter-culture), showed a number of parallel activities at the time of the most inten-sive operation of the Orange Alternative, listing in a single breath: Grotowski’s Laboratorium Theatre, Pracownia Olszty(ska, Action Group from Toru( and Bydgoszcz, the Gardzienice Theatre, and the Repassage Gallery; and describing them as: “more than theatre”.$!

Yet events in the microscale could play a significant role in the transforma-tion of consciousness. The Cie'lars organised “ritual” tea parties that need to be treated from the perspective of time as independent works of art. The phrase of the Kwiek/Kulik duo associated with the Gallery, saying that “you are an art-ist of behaviour”, tells us much about how they ran the Repassage Gallery in 1970–1977 in the spirit of Oskar Hansen’s Open Form theory and new formula of direct presence in culture.$$ Shifting the point of semantic gravity, the claim re-sulted in a fusion – to use a simplification – of the artistic approach to everyday life and the “life‘s” approach to art (I intentionally use the term “approach” in-stead of confrontational notions such as “strategy”), taking its root in the 1970s. In the following decade the approach showed itself through operations of the like of Cie'lars’ Dobrze/Sta!czyk, vested with new creative, anarchist energy, orig-inating from the Erisian “spirit of objection”, which is usually manifested in the form of a trickster or jester. The dwarf of the Orange Alternative is obviously

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a political trickster, yet all art associated with the intention of social e!ect seems to have trickster’s qualities.

!""#$#!%& #%'()'!* +$&#(%, or “Love, if spontaneous, is not discouraged by any barrier.”The subject of “art and activism” is too broad and entangled, yet if we have men-tioned the “e!ect of the Orange Alternative” and the e"ciency of these forms of happening, as well as their translation into reality, it will be necessary to exami-ne the details of the e"ciency of performance itself, to avoid misunderstandings. The history of the happening gives evidence that a real action should not be con-sidered more valuable (i.e. more e"cient) then an imagined event that has not been externaly executed. This may be easily understood if one examines the ev-olution of the artistic activity of the author of the notion of “happening”, Kaprow, who, at a certain point in time, practically ceased any external actions in favour of conducting internal ones. The criterion for judgement may be the action’s level of intensity in experiencing causation and its – as we would say today – rhizoma-tic quality (to what extend it moves the network of mutual combinations of signs and events, how much it consctucts senses, and to what level it forms a “singula-rity”). Personally I confirm Kaprow’s opinion saying that performance which is not executed but experienced internally can have a powerful real e!ect.#$

Therefore, happenings of the Orange Alternative performed only conceptu-aly or verbaly may also become interesting.#% Performance, as mentioned, usu-ally roots in presence, albeit it is not a necessary condition of it. The concei-ved and the embodied are dimensions of one single reality. Following the psy-choanalyst approach of Julia Kristeva: a metaphor becomes a metamorphosis through the growth of intensity and condensation of meanings. Categories be-come blurred. Yet the experience remains. The virtual and the real are no long-er a pair of oppositions. In this case, the question arises how to evaluate the e!-iciency of social actors. Which one would be more influencial: the one, whose direct action has a visible external e!ect, or the one whose non-action but pow-erful internal transformation results in a movement e!ecting the entire network of senses (as in the butterfly e!ect). It is rather a provoking problem and not ori-ginal (something similar to a dillema “What to use: sword or pen”). Sometimes one simply needs to move and to do something with his presence; personally and performatively. This may be worth remembering, especially today, when so much can be done with a single movement of a finger on the mouse. The source of movement, therefore, lays elsewhere.

Possibly some of the actions of Orange Alternative, too risky or too dras-tic in confrontation with the police, considered potentially ine"cient and for that reason abandoned, should be included in a full curriculum of the group’s

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art. Performative approach enables this kind of treatment. Evidence prove that the e!ect of the actions of the Orange Alternative was frequently laying in a very significant transformation of feelings, a transformation of anger and fear of the Communist system into a joyful protest activating laughter. “Major Fydrych and his legions of dwarves convinced them that the situation was bad but not se-rious. Just two years later, communism collapsed entirely. The world was shocked with the pace of its fall. Nevertheless, that fact should not have been even a bit surprising for anyone who ever saw, heard or experienced the Orange Alterna-tive in its operations.”"#

!"# $#!"%&, or “The only solution for the future and today is Surrealism.”There are questions that should not be avoided and must turn up in this text. What can the Orange Alternative signify to these historians, anthropologists and other researchers who know the subject only from its documentation, traces of actions, or from records provided by oral history? What might the Orange Alter-native mean in the future, and what forms of operation that it worked out can re-main something more than just precious record of the past? Is there “something more”? What do the signs suggest? Future inquiry is vital, contextual as well as specificating and positioning examination. The interpretation of the archaeolo-gy of the Orange Alternative and its relations to other artistic creations involves opening of the path to acknowledge significant di!erences, portraying the art of action in its more radical political forms that correspond to today’s potentials and circumstances, as well as to regard artists focused entirely on the politics of internal experience and its e!ectiveness.

The actions of the Orange Alternative may also provide the grounds for fur-ther interests in the context of actual discourse about grassroots movements and self-organisation. Employing performative experiences of counterculture enables to develop new forms of social interaction, based on the “desire to cre-ate situations that favour an intensive coexistence of individuals”. These forms designed in the post-productive communications society would probably have to be more subtle and more sophisticated than in times of communism or even in consumptionist phase of neoliberalism."$ Yet it may draw from the Orange Alternative’s approach, and from its means of participation and engagement. The so-called workers of art and areas of their operation, including the social context of art, political art, aesthetic politics, and collectivism are inscribed in the formula of applied social arts in Poland, developed during the evolution of counterculture, and its development in the art of the 1970s. Primarily through the contextual art of %widzi&ski, to which – for unknown reasons – today’s art-ists unfortunately don‘t refer too often."' Because of that, the question of “what does art do?” receives a too narrow interpretation in the circumstances where

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its role in the capacity of a means for transforming the internal experience is marginalised, and its function in the public dimension may often be limited to setting certain political and social questions defined by the system of cultural management and financing. This is the reason why I tried to emphasise the anth-ropological e!ect of the happenings harmonizing the social and the psychologi-cal aspect into a continuum of mutual interdependence.

At the performative level, when a big group of people goes out into the street, the situation of a spectacle – the S situation (S for spectaculum) – automatically develops. The participants know that they would be seen, and the gaze of the wit-nesses adds energy and charges their actions with meaning. The action of set-ting the main point of attention was the beginning of all happenings the Orange Alternative. It was followed by the polarisation between the group of happeners and the group of spectators, which was later to be abandoned to involve activity of the co-participants to play the leading role in the event. This is a basic struc-ture of involving the passer-by and a phenomenology of a majority of Alterna-tive’s surreal-like happenings.

Initiated by a historian, the Orange Alternative can be considered a move-ment aware of the history of the avant-gardes with all their political and so-cial entanglements: from the futurists’ support of fascism, anti-fascist activi-ty of the Dadaists, communist engagement of the Surrealists, and anarchism of the situationists and the Provos. This awareness built a distance towards politics as such, and connected the Alternative to other movements referring sceptically to all the forms of power games. This is why the initiative of a group of friends from Wroc"aw purposefully based on ambiguity, not only due to censorship intro-ducing the dissociating of meaning, and blurring. Its achievements such as tac-tical frivolity and its e!ect on the existential plane are hard to overemphasise. The appearance of dwarves in the street, their operation, and their disappearan-ce, it was leaving the spectators with a strange feeling of nonsense. Moreover, they provoked a consideration of “what the cause of this feeling is: the break-ing of the rules or the experiencing of the illusion of stability and stagnation”.#$ This is the %&%& e!ect: being kicked out of the groove, a provocation that makes use of surreal poetics.

!"# $%&' () &*++#%,-&$, or “Let us not be afraid to be honest to the end.”It is very important to remember that the notion of “surrealism”, used in the con-text of the Orange Alternative, was applied to express strangeness, unusual, un-real and fantastic character of an object, and this was the first and basic mean-ing of it. In this sense a term “surrealism” is used in common language. When writing his introduction to the Anthology of Surrealism, Adam Wa'yk did not omit this point.

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As mentioned before, the notion of surrealism was used by the happening art-ists in an unorthodox manner, and frequently had nothing to do with the philos-ophy of integrated reality postulated by André Breton, combining the dream and wakefulness into a single superreality. It was rather a mask used to remain spon-taneous, and a way of undercover criticism. Still in 2004, Fydrych spoke about “expansion of surrealism”, when pointing on the advancing disorder in the field of politics and corruption. It hardly had anything to do with surrealism in the strict sense, but provided bases for associating it with the meaning that the colloquial language gave it. Calling something “absurd” (as in the sentence “one absurdity was chasing another”) served emphasising the resistance against the reality of the regime. It was alike with the expression of “the happening of everyday life in Poland”, which was linked to the happeners’ experiences from their activities in which a basic scheme of interactions with the police was established: the harsh-er the police reaction, the more ridicule its e!ects. The most famous example of this was during the famous “stoping of inflation by the police.” (During the acti-on police started chasing an object with “The Inflation” inscription on it, which was passed by the crowd from hands to hands, and finally halted by the o"cers.) When saying that there are “better happenings in the parliament than the oper-ations of the Orange Alternative”, Fydrych ironically pointed to the “spontane-ous character” and the “improvisation” of what politicians do instead of work-ing. The verbal puns, its transversal character (doubletalk), allowed sincerity and critical directness, which would otherwise have been repressed. The language is at the service of intention, and not the other way round, while some categories and words retain their flexibility and internal versatility which the artists frequent-ly find highly suitable. This is also a reference to social stereotype of an artist as the other, a weirdo, a madman. Yet, there is a method in this madness.

!"#$%&"'&, or “Which of the philosophers, I’m seriously asking, would dare say about the being from ‘I think therefore I am’ ‘I enjoy therefore I am’?”Mohandas Gandhi, the most famous promoter of nonviolence, once said, “Be the change that you would like to see in the world”. In the process of crystal-lisation of the common dream about a world that we desire, it is predominant-ly the internal practice that seems be significant; nevertheless, there are situ-ations when one must suspend the non-action and perform an action e"cient-ly and with joy.

When asked about counterculture in Poland, Krzysztof Lewandowski, a wri-ter and owner of legendary publishing houses “Empty Cloud” and “Flying Kite”, said “the source of political happening lies in the ridiculous character of power. The more ridiculous it is, the more intensive the political happenings.” This is just the point.

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The Orange Alternative are the yes-men of Solidarity, uncompromising pro-vocateurs, intelligent enough to apply the method of non-violence and to achieve measurable e!ects."# In this sense, they are “konkretny” people in the sense given to the term by Padraic Kenney, writing about the Carnival of Revolution in Eastern Europe.$% His book analyses the actions of involved alternative ar-tistic movements in the entire region, groups that used laughter to defend free-dom in Wroc&aw, Lviv, Leipzig, and Teplice. The author points out the exceptio-nal social e!ectiveness and the political results of these actions achieved mostly by unconventional artistic forms, opening to social communication and direct manner. According to the American researcher, the happenings of the Orange Alternative and paralel groups had a significant influence on the process of his-torical change of the political systems. Carnival, which Kenney perceives accor-ding to Bakhtin’s theory, proves a strong influence of countercultural activities of the Orange Alternative, as well as activities of the Czechoslovak John Len-non Peace Club, and the Peace and Human Rights initiative in East Germany. Today, these actions can be examined in the field of the anthropology of per-formance, and compared to the recent political happenings, like happenings against the politics of Bush or Kaczy'ski, or performances of the Free Hemp Movement, which can be a great example of initially small and local influen-ce group gradually expanding their impact on social awareness. Isn’t the Spirit of Rebellion eternal? The Orange Alternative is ()(), and as Tzara once wrote,

“Dada is political”.

!"# $%&'()*, or “Let no one dare argue with the last sentences. )& &)#. No one is allowed. No one.”Although ()() is habitually associated with the nonsense, it should be linked with the paradox instead. The power of familiarity is mistakenly trying to con-vince us that we live in a certain dualist system: nonsense – sense, from which there is no way out. In this juxtaposition, it is the nonsense that follows the sense, yet let us not be so scrupulous in repeating this doubtful hierarchy. For it seems that it is rather the sense that originates from nonsense, much like everything that is generated from chaos, and not the other way round. ()() sounds child-ish, because it has a quality of being primal, close to the beginnings. It draws its power from the frivolity pitted against the structure of mature shells and masks of personas. “Sense” is connected with reason, understanding, logic and order; like in expression “to make sense” where it manifests in a singular form. Alter-natively, “the senses” are multiple. The artist introduces the new and uncom-mon, adds something to the resources of culture, transforms and enriches it, and therefore acts in accord with the principle of n–1+n (where n–1 stands for remov-al of the present order of ideas, +n is the enriching element).

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A situation of multiplicity is developed, no longer dominated by a single sense, but the plurality of senses, the sensory and aesthetic fusion of signals. Nonsense serves a cause that makes sense, is present on the surface of the event, defines it formally, yet in the background of the action there is a political di!erence, and it is that di!erence which defines the context. The context may be a reference to the alternative, to what is di!erent (to other texts). From that multiplicity on a higher level of complexity a quantum leap can be made into the new experien-ce of sens. The sense crystallises for a moment, acquires a form and is dissolved again, into the joyful chaos of multiplicity, from which another structure will be formed and a new alternative will be born.

!. All the quotes dividing the text into modules come from Waldemar Major Fydrych’s Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism.

". See: Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens. Zabawa jako !ród"o kultury, transl. by Maria Kurecka, Witold Wirpsza, Warszawa !#$%. I will add that, contrary to some opinions, it seems that the Orange Alternative has its source in the meetings in the club Indeks (fun) and in happenings (performance art), and the gesture of painting dwarves on the white spots with which censors covered the slogans of the opposition came second.

&. The Di#erences, a documentary film prodused in Poland in "''(, %'’, dir. by Jan Przy)uski. There is no space here to define what politics is for *widzi+ski and for his particular understanding of the nature of politics, so in these matters I need to refer you to the higher doctoral thesis on *widzi+ski currently being written by Kazimierz Piotrowski, and primarily to *widzi+ski’s book Art, society and selfconciousness, Calgary !#(#.

,. Grzegorz Dziamski, Performance, czyli otwarcie na codzienno$% &ycia, [in:] Awangarda po awangardzie, Pozna+ !##%; Roselee Goldberg, Performance Art. From Futurism to the Present, "nd ed. expanded and edited, London – New York !#$$ (!st ed. !#(# titled Performance: Live Art. '()( to the Present); Jerzy Grotowski, Teksty z lat '(*+–'(*(, ed. by Janusz Degler, Zbigniew Osi+ski, "nd ed. expanded and edited, Wroc)aw !##'.

%. See: Leszek Kolankiewicz, Eleusis. Oczy szeroko zamkni,te, [in:] Mi,dzy teatrem a literatur-. Ksi,ga ofiarowana Profesorowi Januszowi Deglerowi w *+. rocznic, urodzin, ed. by Jan Miodek, Adolf Juzwenko, Wroc)aw "'',, pp. &!–#!.

-. See e.g.: Crisis and the Arts. The History of Dada, ed. by Stephen C. Foster, New York – London !##-. (. See: Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, transl. Ron Padgett, London !#(!, pp. ,&–,,. $. Many years after the historical Dadaism, the precursor of performance, Zbigniew Warpechowski,

showing the uncompromising character of performance art and radical qualities of truth, made a performance in which he also exhibited an axe, yet it was he himself who was seated on a chair in the place of a sculpture.

#. Let me add that the authorship of the anonymous article that caused the scandal has not been determined to this day; The Richard Mutt Case was written most probably by Beatrice Wood or – something which cannot be excluded – by Duchamp himself.

!'. Quoted from: Adrian Henri, Environments and Happenings, London !#(,. !!. I wrote about this in the brief history of performative actions in Poland entitled Sztuka akcji, S)upsk

"''(. !". Klara Kemp-Welsch, Zrozumie% manifestacje Beresia, [in:] Jerzy Bere$. Sztuka zgina &ycie./.Art Bends

Life, catalogue of an exhibition at Krakow’s Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery, Kraków "''(, p. "%.

!&. Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution. Central Europe '(/(, Princeton "''". Note also the work by Lisiunia A. Romanienko, Antagonism, Absurdity and the Avant-garde. Dismantling Soviet Opression through the Use of Theatrical Devices by Poland’s “Orange” Solidarity Movement, “International Review of Social History” "''(, No. &, pp. !&&–!%!. It is a part of the lengthier publication Humour and Social Protest, ed. by Dennis Bos, Marjolein t’Hart, Cambridge "''$.

!,. Jerzy Bere., a video recording of an interview, Ustka "''(, from the author’s archive.

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!". Miros#aw P$czak, “The Orange Ones, the Street, and the Background”, Performing Arts Journal, !%%!, Vol. !&, No. ', pp. "(–"". Although Karnawa! Rio-botniczy was the name of a happening held on !)th February !%**, I would like to use the context for definition of a broader happening phenomenon.

!). See: “Happening, czyli o realno"ci”, próba hermeneutyki akcji Tadeusza Kantora i jego my"li o kryzysie formy /kryzysie realno"ci, [in:] Sztuka akcji, op. cit., p. !'.

!+. See: El,bieta Cie-lar, Dzika lewica, anielscy anarchi"ci, [in:] El#bieta i Emil Cie"larowie. Anarchia. Repassage, ed. by Maryla Sitkowska, Warszawa '((!.

!*. Escravara Isaura, (The Slave named Isaura) was a Brasilian soap opera broadcasted at that time by Polish state television and an extremely popular.

!%. The influence was noticed by P$czak in The Orange Ones, the Street, and the Background, op. cit. On “active culture” see: Leszek Kolankiewicz, Na drodze do kultury czynnej. O dzia!alno"ci Teatru Laboratorium w latach $%&'–$%&&, Wroc#aw !%+*.

'(. In !%*), Grotowski moved to Pontedera in Italy, but his work at the Workcenter and the Laboratorium Theatre in the !%+(s and the first half of the !%*(s formed an independent approach in the following years, as it was founded on building a powerful base on the grounds of theatrical practice combining esoteric work with personality development. See: L. Kolankiewicz, Na drodze do kultury czynnej, op. cit.

'!. Aldona Jaw#owska, Wi(cej ni# teatr, Warszawa !%**. ''. “The person – let us bring to mind again the Warsaw performers, the Kwieks – ‘behaves always and

everywhere’, his being assumes a certain form dependent on multiple factors, which he may control and shape. This is true both about art and life. Everyone is ‘an artist of behaviour’; or, rather, should be one. This is the live art”, from: Jan Przy#uski, “Performance, historia i gest”, an unpublished text, in the materials of the Institute of Polish Culture of the University of Warsaw.

'&. Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, New York !%)). '.. Performer Zbigniew Warpechowski developed a notion of “the moment Zero”: the key point for the whole

event which may occur before, during or after the action. See: J. Przy#uski, Sztuka akcji, op. cit. '". Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post, quoted from: Waldemar Fydrych, )ywoty M(#ów

Pomara*czowych, Wroc#aw '(!(. '). In an interview, Ludwik Flaszen, co-creator of the Laboratorium Theatre, formulated a precious

remark, namely that “in socialism one needed to fight against external enthralment. Capitalism is less dangerous. In a free state, where you don’t go to prison for your views, where anything can be said and done, one needs to struggle with internal limitations and find a smart answer to the question what to do with freedom. Otherwise, it may prove great boredom”, quoted from: Gazeta Wyborcza (Bydgoszcz), '%th June '((+.

'+. Artur /mijewski, Stosowane sztuki spo!eczne. Manifest, [in:] Krytyka Polityczna nr !!/!', '((+, pp.!.–'.. '*. M. P$czak, The Orange Ones, the Street, and the Background, op. cit., See also: L.A. Romanienko,

Antagonizm, absurd i awangarda, op. cit., and: Humour and Social Protest, op. cit. '%. According to Naomi Klein, “The Yes Men continue the cultural strategy of Jonathan Swift and other

scathing satirists. In the history of anti-globalism no Molotov cocktails have been thrown as accurately as the satire of the Yes Men.” Quoted from: Bartek Chaci0ski, Atak ludzi na Tak, Przekrój weekly, '((., No. .+, pp. "!–"&.

&(. P. Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution, op. cit. Kenney builds the notion of “konkretny people”, speaking about people with an initiative: activists of the alternative stage of the Eastern Bloc.