Newman Borowski Talk Revised

8/3/2019 Newman Borowski Talk Revised

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[Final revised version: major changes indicated by yellow

highlight]

Michael NewmanGoldsmiths College and

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Enunciations of the Artist between Total Art andVoid:Comparing Wlodzimierz Borowski with Yves Kleinand Marcel Broodthaers

Introduction

$$$Its a pleasure to be invited to think about an artist of great

importance but with whose work I am largely unfamiliar. It is also

a daunting prospect. Speaking from my position of non-expertise,

it seemed to me that the way in which I could best contribute

something would be to take a comparative approach. Both to

approach Borowskis work through artists whose work andrelation to their historical contexts I know a bit better, not only to

try to grasp how Borowskis work might seem important seen

through that lens, but also to see what light Borowskis work and

activities might throw on those artists.

First, to establish a theoretical framework, I want to very

briefly consider the relations between originality, event,transcendence, institution, and history. Which sounds like

pretty well everything neo-avant-garde art has been

concerned with. But I don't mean this list to be a rag-bag. Let

me give a very schematic conceptual outline.

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1. The question of originality is raised in Kant's 1st Critique, in

the section on genius, following come clues from

Wincklemann's consideration of the originality of Greek art. Ofcourse we know that originality has been deconstructed in

philosophy (Derrida) and subjected to a practical critique in

appropriation art (Sherrie Levine). However the structure that

Kant adduces is still extremely important in its implications,

since it concerns the relation between history considered as a

set of contexts or frameworks in relation to which objects and

texts may be interpreted, to historicity as the power of

beginning and the advent of the new in the strong sense of

that which is more than a perpetuation of the same. Genius in

art, Kant recognizes, involves discontinuity, and in this, he

claims, it is different from the role of genius in science.

Originality is the name for this discontinuity. But the problem

then arises of what makes the work of art an original work of

genius rather than "original nonsense". Or, how can the

distinction of historicity from history be maintained without

becoming arbitrary on the one hand, or disappearing into the

reduction to context on the other? The recognition by a public

is not enough, since this can never be the basis for the

distinction of the work of genius from the existing state of

things. So Kant turns to the relation of the successor genius to

the predecessor. A genius is affirmed as such by being taken

by the successor as a model not in the sense of following -that is imitating their works - but rather as a model of what it

is to be original. That is, the successor recognizes the

predecessor by breaking the law of the work that the

predecessor had created.

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2. Originality in this radical sense is tied to the notion of the

event. In trying to understand the relation of the event to the

situation in which it occurs and the traces it may or may notleave, I have found Alain Badiou's analyses of the poet

Mallarm to be very helpful, even if I am not up to quite

following the way he relates the event to mathematical set

theory. The point that I want to emphasize from Badiou is that

if the event is radically new, radically other, it will appear from

the point of view of the situation as a void. Using set theory,

Badiou makes a distinction between the multiplicity before

the count and after: the void is the appearing of this

inconsistent multiplicity before the count in relation to the

situation on the basis of which it is counted. He wants to

relate the event to multiplicity rather than unity, which has

political implications, against the reduction of the people as

multiple. (The structure is rather similar to, and I think derived

from, that of the Real in relation to the Symbolic and

Imaginary in Lacan.) What, then, is the role of art in relation to

this structure? It is tempting to say that the artwork is the

even, but this is not I think correct from the point of view of

Badiou's analyses of Mallarm. Rather, the role of art is closer

to that set out by Lacan in his discussion of Sublimation in his

seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: art according to Lacan

is the circumscription of the void with signifiers. The work of

art is not the event itself, but the attempt to trace is, or tosalvage its traces - this is the gist of Badiou's analysis of

Mallarm's poem Un coup de ds, "a throw of the dice will

never abolish chance" (a poem that was of course so

important to Broodthaers that he had to efface it). Effectively

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the event is only manifest in the erasure of its traces, because

the fetishization of the trace will only reduce it to what Badiou

calls "the state of the situation". An important point to hold on

to is that art takes place not "in" the void, but at its edge,

between the void and the situation. It is a mediation of the

irruptive event that does not reduce it to the pre-existing

situation, and in that sense is what Maurice Blanchot and

Emmanuel Levinas have called "un rapport sans rapport", a

relation without relation. This is something that is of course

extremely hard for art history to deal with, since art history

tends to reduce the "sans rapport", ending up as an attempt

to interpret and conceptualize, in such a way as what is

distinctive of the work of art as work of art tends to disappear.

It is in this sense that we need to understand the "autonomy"

of the work of art, which would take us back to the "without

qualities" of the Kantian self-legislation, since it is precisely

through its qualities that something is mediated.

3. This brings us to the question of transcendence. What is at

stake here is not the ahistoricality of art with respect to a

higher being, art having to do with a higher, timeless realm as

opposed to the immanence of change. Rather, what is at

stake is otherness. Here I take the "rapport sans rapport" of

Levinas as a model. The point of otherness is that it affects

immanence without being reduced to it. How the other affects

immanent being is through the trace. The trace is the mark in

being of the absolutely other. It is how the other leaves a

mark in being without being reduced to immanence, without

being reduced to already existing relations or projections. So

transcendence here has to do with the relation of otherness to

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immanence, which must combine relation (otherwise how

would I be affected and called to respond) with non-relation

(otherwise how would the other not cease to be other and

thereby make that kind of claim on me). Following from what I

have said about the event, I wouldn't place art in the position

of the other (which would be idolatry), but rather in the

position of the trace (if art were in the position of the other it

could only be an art absolutely without qualities, an art of

total erasure, which is not inconceivable, but would have to

be strictly speaking invisible).

4. It should be evident from these remarks how the relation of

art both to history and to institution might be problematized.

Art is capable of tracing the relation of an interruption to its

situation without reducing it to the situation. It is in this sense

that we might understand the relative autonomy of art: as

the condition for the relation without relation to the event.

This also means that art cannot avoid the risk of becoming

affirmative with respect to the situation, whether that involves

an institution or a repressive social group, or both. We could

say that the artwork is on the edge between the event and its

resorption into its situation. It is here that spectacle, culture

industry and the state become relevant, according to the

specificities of the historical moment and geographical

location.

I hope that through these remarks I have sketched an historical

ontology of art to provide some common terms for a comparative

approach to certain moments in Borowski's work. I want to begin

with the idea of the artwork in relation to the event and its

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situation, through a comparison with Yves Klein.

Klein: The Void

$$$I have no idea what the impact in Poland was at the time

of Yves Klein's exhibition Le Vide at the Galerie Iris Clert in

Paris in 1958, and the exhibition that followed in 1960 $$

$called Le Plein in which Arman filled the same gallery with

garbage. [$$$RETURN TO LE VIDE]Given the amount of

publicity it received, it could hardly have gone unnoticed. On

the opening night apparently some 3000 people filled the

gallery and the street outside, and with 200 visitors a day, the

exhibition was extended for a week. The full title of the

exhibition was: La spcialization de la sensibilit l'etat de

matire premire en sensibilit picturale stabilize (The

Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State of

Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility).

The external window was painted blue, and the entrance

lobby was framed by a blue theatre curtain. At the opening

there were Republican Guards in uniform, and blue cocktails

were offered to the visitors.

A short film-documentation of the exhibition exists. $$$ [AND

CLICK]

My point is not really about causal influence, but rather about

similarities and significant differences. As exhibition space, or

place, Klein's Le Vide was by no means empty: rather the void

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has to be produced, solicited, by means of an elaborate

staging - the blue curtain at the door, the lighting, let alone

the Republican Guards. $$$There is a strong element of

blague, of joke or trick, about the whole episode, which Klein

extended to his Leap into the Void (Le Saut dans le Vide). For

the latter he created a newspaper, Dimanche - Le Journal d'un

seul jour (Sunday - The Newspaper for Only One Day), $$

$which was a 4-page broadsheet sold at news stands in Paris

on Sunday 27 November 1960, in which the leap was reported

and publicized. The condition of visibility of the void - whether

framed by the gallery or leapt into - is that it becomes

spectacle and publicity.

$$$Rather than a procedure of emptying, Borowski's 2nd

Syncretic Show at the Foksal Gallery in 1966, and Gallery Pod

Mona Liza show in Wroclaw in 1969 both involve a process of

inversion. What is inverted is the relation between the artist

and work on the one hand, and the visitors to the gallery on

the other. In the 2nd Syncretic Show the visitors to the Foksal

gallery confronted a barrier made of plastic plant pots with

nails through them pointing in their direction. $$$The critics

were corralled in the office, and couldnt cross the barrier into

the gallery either. Within the main gallery space were

spinning rectangular boards with mirrors on one side, and

spotlights pointing blindingly towards the viewers. $$$The

artist placed himself within this space, by the wall between

the entrance space and the office, so that he could not be

seen directly from either position. Possibly his reflection may

have been glimpsed in the spinning mirrors, which must have

also reflected back the fragmented image of the public, if they

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could be seen through the barriers. So the artist placed

himself in his show, but rendered himself virtually invisible.

This is how Borowski describes the situation in an undated

manuscript quoted in the current exhibition:

With the zeal of a neophyte, I started to construct

instruments to provoke art. I brutally isolated the public

from the entire artistic process, imposing on them the

kind of behavior I wanted, myself sitting for a while

inside the pot with its strange magic, filling space with

bits and pieces of reflections, of human beings,

pulsating lights, cracking switches. Dazzled by

floodlights, separated from the gallery by barbed grilles,

the public thronged the administration section of the

gallery. Still, I caught them there as well, having

installed signs saying SILENCE, lighting up alternately

with the lamps in the gallery.

Ill come back to this silence. The publics expectation of the

artist, their projection onto him as either a hero or a sacrificial

figure is frustrated, as their own fragmented image is

projected back to them and they are threatened by a hostile,

nail-studded barrier.

$$$In the Pod Mona Liza show, the public is again confronted

with their own image, as visitors confront lines of photographs

of visitors to the gallery. In the first the artist disappearsbehind reflections of the public, in the second, he absented

himself altogether, leaving a text to be read instead. $$$

So whereas in Klein's Le Vide the visitors become part of the

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spectacle, their numbers contributing the publicity, in

Borowski's exhibitions they are reflected back at themselves

so that they become in effect the work. In each case there is a

withdrawal - withdrawal of the object or of the artist - which

draws attention to the conditions. In Le Vide those conditions

are those of the staging, where the public form an audience in

a rather conventional sense, with the advertising of the

numbers anticipating the way in which the blockbuster

exhibition will come to dominate the economy of museums,

following the logic of the music and movie industries. In

Borowski's exhibitions, the effect is closer to the idea that the

audience is drawn into participating in a performance where

they are the actors. If both Klein and Borowski's works are

theatrical, this is in a different sense in each case. The heavy

blue curtain in Le Vide betrays its "proscenium arch"

conception of theatre, with in Theatre du vide, the artist as a

kind of Nijinski doing his impossible leap, which is of course

faked. We don't see the judokas from the Judo school opposite

holding the tarp to catch the 4th Dan judo master, since thephotograph has been manipulated by being montaged with a

second of the street empty. Borowski's "stagings" involved

different, radicalized conception of theatre, which was far

more developed at that time in Poland than practically

anywhere else. The theatricality of Borowski's

"manifestations" has more to do with breaking down the

distinction between public, work, and artist - creating a space

or place in common - than it does with mounting a spectacle

in such as way that the public are rendered passive.

The PLACE

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The programmatic statement of the Foksal Gallery issued in

1966 has the title Introduction to the General Theory of the

Place, and used the word "place" several times in the body ofthe text, notably in the statement:

"The PLACE is a sudden gap in the utilitarian approach to the

world. The PLACE arises, when all the laws holding in the

world are suspended. The PLACE is one and indivisible."

As Piotr Piotrowski interprets this statement in his book In the

Shadow of Yalta,

"The gallery was supposed to function as such an autonomous

and isolated place. It was unconventional in so far as it did not

'host exhibitions', or create situations secondary to the works

themselves or merely arranged them for public presentation.Instead, it provided a place for creation and production of

'living' art. The gallery as 'the place' was supposed to be,

according to the critics who formed it, 'non-transparent'; it

was supposed to have a real and autonomous presence."

(296)

Conceptual Art in the West tended to engage in a critique of

autonomous modernism, associated with the criticism of

Clement Greenberg. It would seem that in the different

circumstances of Poland in the mid-1960s, the critique of the

art object needs to be secured by the transfer of autonomy -

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which retains a critical value - to the place itself, the gallery in

relation to the broader political circumstances, specifically the

instrumentalization of art under communism. However, just as

in Western Europe and North America, both autonomy and

anti-autonomy (including in the form of institutional critique)

can be functionalized, whether for the purposes of the state or

in a market context for spectacular commodification.

However, a gap remains between place and situation, even

when quite minimal, in the form of a displacement. That very

small difference nonetheless opens up a space of potential.

But place and situation can never be quite distinct either. The

problem becomes how to create a disjunct between place and

situation in order to reflect on their relation.1

The discussion of place that occurred around the Foksal

gallery, and their historical reformulations, are very helpfully

discussed in Pawer Polits excellent essay on artmargins.com,

Warsaws Foksal Gallery 1966-72: Between PLACE and

Archive. $$$The little I have to add is that to me the

capitalization of "PLACE" in the Foksal statement recalls the

following capitalized sequence over two spreads of Mallarm's

poem "Un coup de ds n'abolira jamais le hasard [A throw of

the dice will never abolish chance]":

RIEN...N'AURA EU LIEU..QUE LE LIEUEXCPT...PEUT-TRE...UNE CONSTELLATION

1 This seems to be the point that Andrzej Turowski makes in hisessay "Gallery Against Gallery" (quoted in Piotrowski 296).

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["nothing...will have taken pace...but (the)

place...except...perhaps...a constellation"]

$$$What is at stake in the poem as in the gallery is the

relation of the site to the event and the situation that the

event interrupts (if it is not an interruption the happening is

not an event and simply confirms the situation as it is). As the

philosopher Alain Badiou from whom much of my argument

concerning the relation of event to situation derives reads

these lines, either the poem is itself the very trace of theevent, figured by the "constellation", or nothing will have

taken place but the place itself. The constellation is prefigured

by a "perhaps": whether what will have taken place is an

event is in the future anterior, regarding its traces and the

fidelity of the subject to it.2

It has been argued that the layout of Mallarm's poem is

influenced by that of newspapers, as if the body-text were

removed and only the headlines remained. Newspapers are a

means through which technology circulates, words reporting

news are spent like currency, mere tokens. Thus the poem is

dependent - knowingly, deliberately so - on precisely the

technology that it repudiates in its quest to "purify the words

of the tribe". The tracing of the event is dependent on thevery situation that the event interrupts. Rather than an

2 For Badious readings of Mallarm, see Badiou, Being and Event,pp.191198, and Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford,Calif: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp.4656: A Poetic Dialectic:Labd ben Rabia and Mallarm.

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incremental, linear, causal transformation, if the poem is to

change anything, it will be a matter of all or nothing, or else

the small difference that retroactively changes everything.

Broodthaers and Mallarm

$$$Rachel Haidu demonstrates brilliantly in her recently

published book on Marcel Broodthaers how his poet

predecessor functioned as a model for the artist in his

Exposition littraire autour de Mallarm at Wide White Space

gallery in Antwerp in 1969, three years after the Foksal

Gallery statement. The specificities of the situation are of

course in many ways different: an exhibition in a commercial

gallery in Flemish-speaking Antwerp with a title in French and

the theme of the master-poet of French modernism. Language

appears as wordplay, as trace, as letter, as signifier, and in its

effacement. Language is materialized in its obdurate

arbitrariness as tends to happen all the more in bilingualcultures.

In the Exposition litraire, there are many references to

Mallarm, as well as his philosophical, psychoanalytic, literary,

and artistic reception. The exhibition included shirts chalked

with writing, vacuum-formed plaques with letters and pipes,

shelves with editions, and the floor painted black - Rachel

Haidu notes, in her comprehensive account of the Mallarm

connections, like a stage. So a certain kind of "theatre", but

also, with its display shelves and spare arrangement of shirts

anticipate high-end fashion display which came to imitate the

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look of the art exhibition. The vacuum-form plaques refer both

to notices - often in the form of prohibitions, like don't smoke -

and advertising: an objectification of the injunction that "hails"

the spectator (Althusser), positioning him or her with respect

to the symbolic order. $$$In this respect, we might also recall

the stenciled silence in Broodthaers Section Cinma, in his

studio in Burgplatz 12, Dsseldorf (1971-72) visible in Tacita

Deans film homage of 2002. Compare these with the

illuminated silence signs that Borowski placed in the 2nd

Syncretic Show, which were five years earlier. $$$In both

cases we see a concern with an address of the work to the

viewer, or more precisely the work as address.

Broodthaers plaques regress from the utterance to a

materiality of the letter. $$$This is taken further in the

editions based on Mallarm's Un coup de ds: a series of 12

anodized plates, and a book with transparent pages. In each

case, the words on the page have been replaced by black

rectangles, exactly mimicking their position. Broodthaers

replaced the title "Pome" on the cover of the 1914 edition of

Mallarm with "Image", but what we are presented with is

something that is simultaneously iconoclastic and "verbo-

clastic" to coin a word. $$$We could see this gesture as the

refusal of the instrumentalization of language and the

assumptions concerning transparency and accessibility that

would somehow lead to a liberation of the art from the

commodity that went along with the linguistic turn of much

Conceptual art in the US and the UK. Interestingly, there

seems to be a parallel claim to the necessity of autonomy of

place here to that in the discussions around the Foksal Gallery

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in Poland, only in Broodthaers case it is coupled with an equal

sense both of its impossibility, and that the very claim to

autonomy is itself heteronomous, that is, it comes out of

circumstances of the dependence of art on extrinsic

conditions. Further, it would seem that for Broodthaers the

only way of dealing with this situation is through a turn to

discourse, but a discourse rendered enigmatic and blocked.

We could compare this in turn to the aggression towards the

public that takes place in Borowskis installations, including

the Pubes of Taint, which demands that the public become

material for that artist in a parody both of the political

constitution of a people, and of a 60s love-in (the musical Hair

debued off-Broadway in 1967 and on Broadway in the

following year I wonder how well known this was in art

circles it certainly made a strong impact on me in London

when my parents took me in 1969).

In the Exposition litraire the almost exclusive black and white

of the gallery and everything on display in it of course refers

to print on the white page. The black bands of Broodthaers

editions also suggest the conventional black from of a picture

of the deceased. As if the show is a melancholy rejoinder to

the explicit and implicit utopianism of both modernist and

Conceptual art.

The photograph that is reproduced of this display - I took this

picture from Rachel Haidu's book - shows the gallery empty. It

is hard for the viewer of the picture to project him or herself

into the space: we can't see what is on the display shelves,

the letters on the panels are too far away to read, the chalk

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on the shirts is not visible. I didn't see the show, but I imagine

the difficulty was not only for the viewer of the photograph.

The visitor at the time must have wondered how they are to

position themselves, what or who the exhibition wants them

to be. Am I a looker, a reader, a book-shopper, a clothes-

shopper, a collector of art? There is a layering, a multiplicity

of roles involved in being the subject of the exhibition, and

also a strange kind of secrecy, of words that are hidden, of

obscure and implicit references (all rather un-republican no

transparency here and quite typically Belgian). The

exhibition is necessarily a form of exposure, but it also seems

to be about how not to reveal oneself within this ambiguous

public-private space. The black floor suggests a stage, but

perhaps also a void with the panels, shirts, and books clinging

to the edge, traces that circumscribe something missing.

Conclusion

And this brings us back to Borowski's shows at Foksal and PodMona Liza. In the 2nd Syncretic Show the artist is hidden by

the mirrors that reflect the public, so a specular form of

concealment or withdrawal. (I should say here that I have

benefited greatly from reading Luiza Naders excellent essay

The Author: On Disappearing and Returning. The Actions of

Wlodzimierz Borowski.) In the Pod Mona Liza show, the public

is confronted though the photographs of known members with

a kind of ideal version of themselves, again the exhibition as a

way of seeing themselves reflected. Both shows seem to set

up a narcissistic relation and puncture it. The drilling into the

eyes of photographic portraits of the artist in Sensitizing to

Color - 8th Syncretic Show od NOWA Gallery, Poznan, 1968)

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could also be mentioned here. Colored lights were projected

out of the holes, so a subversion of the idea of the artist as a

modernist "see-er" in the very act that would associate the

artist with the tradition of blind seers. (Piotrowski tells us that

an irony of this performance, called Exercises in Color

Theory. Dedicated to the Academy of Fine Arts in Posnan,

was that it took place in a school dominated by faculty that

embraced colorism and taught students according to post-

impressionist criteria [p. 193]).

We are faced with a kind of immodest modesty. The artistmust present the event, the "void" in relation to the situation,

but without filling it himself, without presenting his body as

the place of origin of the work, where the work is elided with

the event. (Mallarm is perhaps the poet who separated work

and event, such that the words become either the flotsam of a

shipwreck or constellation formed of light from stars emitted

long ago.) Work as event, the conflation of the two, would be

the total work, the Gesamptkunstwerk. This is why for

Heidegger, who does equate work and event in "The Origin of

the Work of Art" where he writes that "the work of art begins

history anew" the Greek Temple is the supreme work of art,

and the paradigm of the total work which is also to be

equated with the political state to come with the Fhrer as its

artist, and whose person filled the place of power that Claude

Lefort tells us in a democracy must be left empty. So in the

Pod Mona Liza show of 1967, Borowski the artist withdraws

from the vernissage that is itself the exhibition, leaving, in the

place of his body, a text, Pubes of Taint, that tells the public

that they should strip themselves naked like paint squeezed

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out of a tube, because they themselves are the material. Like

paint, this material comes ready made. It comes wrapped, like

a product. The reference to Kantor's emballages, and indeed

his placing of himself on stage in his theatre, cannot be

avoided here - Borowski's approach is neither the same, nor

exactly the opposite of Kantors. And just as the Duchampian

readymade is displaced, so the "event" comprises an

estrangement of the audience from its situation.

In the postscript to the statement, Borowski writes

"Having discussed the text among my friends, I came to the

conclusion that my statement is bad and gave up the idea of

organizing the event."

So the event can only be an event by becoming a non-event,

what it will have been remaining open ended, so the final

words, referring to banal desire, travel, and place, leaving

things open-ended:

"Nice girl...what a piece...this suitcase isn't bad...what's the

name of this street?"

$$$In connecting with the "voiding" of the total work, its

emptying out by means of broken mirrors, withdrawal, and

the substitution of text, one is reminded of the letter

Broodthaers copied to Beuys in 1972 of a fictitious letter from

the composer of popular operetta Offenbach to Wagner, the

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master of the Gesamptkunstwerk, where he suggests that the

Author of "Art and Revolution" is just as much a client of the

King as he is, and which ends with the words, "Miserable

artists that we are!" $$$Although that is not quite the last

word, since that is followed, above the fake signature, by

"Vive la musique."

Michael Newman 2010

[email protected]

+44-(0)7942-537540

N B ki 19

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