Manifestations of Public Art (original) (raw)
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In recent years, Krakow's district of Podgórze has witnessed the erection of several works in public space that are concerned with the memory of the place. A monumental piece erected by Witold Cęckiewicz in the 1960s in the former Płaszów Concentration Camp has been joined by contemporary works. It is especially the Ghetto Heroes Square and its direct vicinity that have been addressed by artists and designers who, through their works, i.e. Mateusz Okoński's Purification, Łukasz Skąpski's 10 cubic metres of Krakow's wintertime air, and a structure in the form of multiple chairs by Lewicki and Łatak's studio entered into a dialogue with the paradigm of counter-monumentality and postmemory. For common viewers and casual passers-by, as well as for residents of the district, these works are hardly evocative of recent history, or the events they are meant to commemorate. Do these works, with their consciously taken position on the verge of the visible, that is, on the verge of what can be considered art, fulfil their commemorative role? Can the excess of the invisible change at some point into the visible? These questions offer a starting point not only for the discussion of the above-mentioned works in the context of analogous creations in contemporary art of the last two decades, but also for a wider discussion of monumental and counter-monumental art after the Shoah.
Architectus, 2021
Celem artykułu jest prezentacja i wieloaspektowa, krytyczna ocena realizowanej obecnie w Biłgoraju inwestycji określanej mianem „miasteczka na szlaku kultur” bądź „miasteczka kresowego”. Przedmiotowe założenie to współczesna kompozycja, stanowiąca wolną interpretację zabudowy historycznej, pod wieloma względami daleka od faktograficznej wiarygodności, a pretendująca do roli destynacji turystyczno-kulturowej. Mieszkaniowo-usługowe założenie, nawiązujące zewnętrzną formą do tradycyjnej drewnianej małomiasteczkowej architektury regionu, uzupełniane jest – stanowiącymi atrakcje turystyczne – replikami bądź kopiami historycznych obiektów użyteczności publicznej i kultu, charakterystycznych dla etnicznego bogactwa wschodnich obszarów I i II Rzeczypospolitej. Powstający kompleks oceniono zarówno w kontekście roli architektury w budowaniu tożsamości lokalnej i narodowej, jak i niebezpieczeństwa zafałszowania historii na płaszczyźnie edukacyjnej. Analizie poddano formę architektoniczną, układ urbanistyczny i ideowe przesłanki założenia. Zwrócono uwagę na szczytne cele towarzyszące powstaniu kompleksu i ich zbieżność z zamierzeniami architektów kształtujących przed stu laty formy polskiego stylu narodowego. Jednocześnie wykazano negatywne konsekwencje kształtowania swoistej hybrydy historyzującej, ale współczesnej kompozycji z rodzajem skansenu, który powinna cechować rzetelna zgodność z faktografią. Tego typu zabieg doprowadził do stworzenia iluzji autentycznej zabytkowej osady, falsyfikacji oraz popularyzacji zniekształconego obrazu historycznego miasta. Poza analizą in situ, w pracy wykorzystano archiwalny materiał ilustracyjny i tekstowy oraz wyniki badań autentycznej historycznej zabudowy regionu, która stanowić miała wzorzec projektowanego założenia. The aim of the article is the presentation and critical assessment of a development called “The town on the trail of cultures” or “Borderland Town” currently created in Bilgoraj. The main subject of the research is a contemporary composition, which is a free interpretation of historical architecture, in many respects far from factual credibility, but aspiring to be a tourist and cultural destination. The idea of building these houses and commercial properties was to replicate the traditional wooden small-town architecture of the region. Alongside them, of great interest to tourists, are replicas or copies of historic public buildings and places of worship, characteristic of the ethnic diversity of the eastern areas of the First and Second Polish Republic. The emerging district was evaluated in the context of the role of architecture in building local and national identity and the danger, from an educational point of view, of falsifying history. The architectural form and urban layout of the project, as well as its ideational premises was analysed. Special attention was paid to the noble objectives that accompanied the creation of the complex, and their convergence with the intentions of the architects who a century ago shaped the forms of the Polish national style. At the same time, the negative consequences of creating a peculiar hybrid of a historicizing but still contemporary composition and a kind of open-air museum, which should be characterized by reliable compliance with the facts, were shown. This type of procedure has led to creating an illusion of an authentic historic settlement, its falsification and popularisation of a distorted image of an historic town. The work was based on in-situ studies as well as analyses of archival illustrations and textual material and research into the authentic, historical architecture of the region, which was to serve as a model for the designed complex.
"The Polish Journal of Aesthetics", [special issue: Memory and (Counter) Monuments, eds. Carla Milani Damião, Natalia Anna Michna],, 2017
The purpose of this article is to explore the ideological contexts of sculptural works by Northern modernists: Gustav Vigeland (1869–1943) from Norway, Bernhard Hoetger (1874–1949) from Germany, and the Icelander Einar Jónsson (1874–1954). The original iconographies of the Vigelandsanlegget in Oslo, Hoetger’s Platanenhein in Darmstadt, as well as Jónsson’s oeuvres collected in Reykjavik, will be interpreted in relation to wider discourses—i.e. Nietzschean influence, a particular taste for the esoteric (theosophy) and, last but not least, a noticeable aversion to classical form.
2011
The rapid development of the big European cities in the XXth century and the change of the traditional city into a metropolis ga ve birth not only to an extraordinary dynamic artistic culture but also to a culture of i nterpreting, dedicated to the study and explanation of these urban phenomena and their soci al effects. The aim of this paper is to build a bridge between various practices of contemp orary art as they can be found in public art (to be more specific: site-specific art, as we ill see) and a series of disciplines dealing with the studying of urban space: urban sociology, human geography and the anthropology of the everyday, all inspired by critical theories of culture and society. From this point on, we will be able to meditate upon public art’s role in the urban public space.
2015
The article focuses on (re)constructing the local memorial landscape in a post-Soviet military base in Poland and the process of forging the local identity of its new inhabitants in the years 1993–2015. These processes, which occurred after the withdrawal of Russian Federation forces from the base and the establishment of a civilian town, find their reflection in the urban space of Borne Sulinowo and are written into a broader context of state policies and national debates about the past. The aim of the article is to present how the initiative in these processes has gradually shifted from the national level to the local, causing fragmentation and pluralisation of the collective memory. In this context certain significance can be attributed to the need to comply with EU standards, and to the progress of com-mercialisation of the past related to the development of tourism. KEYWORDS: collective memory • memorial landscape • post-Soviet base • post-communist Poland • urban space I N T R O D U C T I O N A contemporary flâneur strolling about the town of Borne Sulinowo encounters signs and symbols which at almost every turn testify to the town's complicated past. The efforts undertaken by the Poles since the early 1990s to 'domesticate' the urban space, together with the development of new social and cultural practices and gradual transformation and reinterpretation of the cultural landscape of Borne Sulinowo, bear testimony to an attempt to put down roots and construct a local identity, 1 combined with the need for locals to create their own place within the world, as " no one lives in the world in general " (Geertz 1996: 262). People construct, cultivate and preserve both their personal and collective identities as they remember and forget (Connerton 1989; 2009; Wertsch 2004), commemorate and repress the past and present narratives. In the process of constructing a local identity, what matters greatly is the history of urban landscape and the configurations of the 'things' that fill places and change over time. The space of this post-Soviet base contains multiple material traces of the past presence of Soviets and Germans in the area. The presence of these traces is not indifferent to the shaping of the identity of the local community and its attitude to the past. The foreign material and symbolic legacy, to the same.
Art Inquiry. Recherches sur les arts 2018, vol. XX, 2018
This article will cover a number of issues concerning artistic events indicated in the title with emphaisis on the activities or projects of the artists actively involved ‘ordinary citizens,’ the inhabitants of Poland’s Western and Northern Territories, where Poles were resettled after 1945, in the process of co-creation/reception of their artistic work. An attempt will be made to answer the following questions: To what extent did the en plein air events and symposia de facto realize the ideas propagated by the communist authorities in Poland? Perhaps these artworks, originally intended by their creators to enliven the public space, are now perceived from the contemporary perspective and have finally triumphed over empty communist dialectics, creating artistic value that Pierre Bourdieu could include within the scope of objectified forms of cultural capital? Did they really contribute to the cultural ‘domestication’ of the northern and western territories, where the dicussed events were organized? Also, last but not least: the question concerning the nature of the aforementioned participation – what was the nature of the contribution from the individual participants to the co-creation and realization of the projects?
The Artist and Journal of Home Culture, 2021
This article deals with the issues of architectural elements of public space, treated as components of art and visual communication, and at the same time determinants of the emotional aspects of political conflicts, social disputes, and media discourse. The aim of the considerations is to show, with the usage of the principles of critical analysis of media discourse, the impact of social events, political communication, and the activity of mass communicators on the perception of the monument of historical memory and the changes that take place within its public evaluation. The authors chose the method of critical analysis of the media discourse due to its compliance with the planned purpose of the analyses, thus, providing the opportunity to perform qualitative research, enabling the creation of possibly up-to-date conclusions regarding both the studied thread, and allowing the extrapolation of certain conclusions to other examples. The media material relating to the controversial M...