Edward Krasinski
It was pure chance that led Edward Krasinski to experiment with bright blue, 19mm wide Scotch tape in the late 1960s. He tried it out first on his immediate surroundings, on trees and people: ‘I stuck a stripe onto the wall and it was there, blue, 130cm high. And so it stayed.’ Some years later, in 1970, he was in Paris. With Daniel Buren he taped the courtyard of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the windows of the galleries on the Left Bank. ‘It was like guerrilla warfare. At rue de Seine the old gallery owners went around shouting and accusing me of profaning an art site, and they called the police,’ he recalls in an interview featured in the catalogue accompanying this retrospective, but, he asserts, ‘I did not violate them. I only revealed them.’
Since then, the distinctive blue stripe – more of an indication of a concept than an art object – has taken on a meaning of its own. What was it? ‘Ask the stripe’, was the artist’s laconic reply. Krasinski, who was born in Luck, Poland, in 1925 and who died in 2004, could be quite stubborn in his insistence on his ties with Dada and Surrealism. And anyone engaging with his oeuvre should keep that in mind, particularly in the context of this show, where the chosen exhibits told a different story, exploring, as they did, both the works’ obvious roots in 1920s’ Unism – a Polish brand of Constructivism which aspired to unite the sculpture with the surrounding space – and its affinity with Minimal and Conceptual art. The emergence of Conceptualism in Poland can, in fact, be dated to the day when Krasinski replaced works delayed at sea on their way to the 1970 Tokyo Biennial with a telex that repeated the word ‘BLUE’ 5,000 times. He had the organizers place the long strip of telex tickertape in the exhibition until the works themselves finally arrived in Japan almost a month later.
Working in close collaboration with the artist’s estate, the curators of this retrospective, Sabine Breitwieser and Bettina Spörr, decided not only to début some previously unseen sculptures but also to take on the challenge of reconstructions and to exhibit documentary photographs of Krasi´nski’s
work (the majority of which were taken by Eustachy Kossakowski). One such image shows a 1968 exhibition at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, of which Krasinski had been one of the founders two years earlier. The gallery’s curatorial approach was influenced by Wieslaw Borowski, Hanna Ptaszkowska and Mariusz Tchorek’s Introduction to the General Theory of the Venue, in which the writers claim that, whereas in the past exhibitions had ahistorically forced art works into a herd existence, the venue, ‘as the most authentic theme of the event’, was now to become the actual subject. Accordingly, in Kossakowski’s photo of the gallery the audience squeezes in between waist-high rostra; the exhibition architecture is as crowded as a labyrinthine furniture depot; and, instead of providing a protective podium for the fragile sculptures fashioned from tubes, wires and paint, the ineffectual white-painted boxes and cubes acting as supports look more like a deliberate attempt by the ever inquisitive Krasinski to surrender his works to the mercy of the crowd. Unsurprisingly, the whereabouts of many of these sculptures is no longer known.
At the centre of the Generali’s reconstruction of the Foksal space stood the long pipe that could also be seen in documentary photographs of the original exhibition. Around this stood four authentic works from the show, as well as nine further Krasinski sculptures that the curators had chosen for their close resemblance to the originals. While the decision to include these works certainly prompted considerations of authenticity, an isolated presentation of previously unseen works would surely have been even more false.
Fortunately, no such concerns beset the reconstruction of the ill-fated Tokyo exhibition, ‘Between Man and Matter’, since almost all of the original exhibits were still available for loan (including a fragment of the tickertape), and the show itself was well documented in hand-drawn sketches. Perhaps, more than any other part of the show, this reconstruction evinced what Krasinski was aiming for. Inseparable from the art works in this installation were the display units – the precisely shaped plinths and the completely white wall cladding – which he had installed in front of the perforated board panels that covered up the walls of the original space. Likewise, and yet conversely, although the part-painted forms of the works are three-dimensional – K.5 (1968), for instance, from which a blue-painted wire flows – they almost look as though they have been painted on.
In the catalogue accompanying the show, Adam Szymczyk aptly describes Krasinski’s sculptures as ‘wires that encircle nothing, pipes through which nothing flows, batteries that generate no current’. What appears so constructive at first, and yet so hollowed out, inscribes itself on the utter whiteness of the space like a dream: as dissolving tools, melting scripts, markings from the unconscious.
