This chapter will argue that in order to understand Tadeusz Kantor’s relationship to, and place i... more This chapter will argue that in order to understand Tadeusz Kantor’s relationship to, and place in, twentieth-century Modernism, it is necessary to understand his inherently poetic and philosophical approach to his practice as an artist. As with other artists for whom the Second World War was a formative experience, Kantor’s particular aesthetic strategies are evidently profoundly influenced by his wartime experience. However, for Kantor this did not happen as a simple linear narrative in his artistic development. Until the 1970s, his experience can be understood to have been continually refracted through his engagement with a succession of international contemporary art practices. Each of Kantor’s encounters with a foreign art movement—Constructivism and abstraction, Surrealism, informel, “zero,” emballage, happening—was transformed in his hands through its intersection with his underlying concerns. As such, separate and, on the surface, seemingly disparate movements acquire a certain homogeneity as they are each détourned by Kantor in his struggles to articulate a poetics of being. As a consequence of his personal operation of them, these individual avant-garde artistic strategies are each turned into vehicles for each other. In this way, and certainly when viewed retrospectively, all of Kantor’s work can be seen to be expressive of certain tendencies from Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism and informel; it is all, in a sense, “impossible,” all “packaged,” all concerned with the “zero” or “nothing” of being, and all concerned with the immediacy and aleatoricism of the happening. With The Dead Class in 1975, Kantor began to leave such explicit engagement with, and personalization of, existing art forms behind. Nevertheless, his ability to consistently bend existing artistic practice to his own purpose is an intrinsic part of the process that led to his later work. The continuous element underlying this process is Kantor’s concern with the paradoxical nature of human being, what the contemporary, post-Heideggerian Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben would later characterize (following Hegel) as “this negative being”— “the thing existing which is not when it is, and is when it is not: a half-glimpsed becoming” (Agamben 2007: 107). Death is the negative side of this “half-glimpsed becoming.” This “negative being” is, in Heidegger’s words, the “placeholder,” or the “lieutenant of the nothing” (Heidegger 1968: 37, and 1998: 93). This chapter will explore in more detail the metaphysical underpinnings of the paradoxical “negative being” of human being in Kantor’s work. Firstly, I will examine the origins of Kantor’s engagement with art informel and argue that his interest with this form may derive from an underlying sense of informe peculiar to Polish Modernism that is embodied in the work of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Witold Gombrowicz, and Bruno Schulz, as much as from the artists he encountered in his trips to Paris in 1948 and 1955. I will then discuss this in relation to Kantor’s détournement of the various avant-gardes that he experimented with during the 1950s and 1960s. In doing so I will show how Kantor’s reflection on aspects of his wartime work surfaces in the late 1960s in a way that prefigures certain key concerns that emerge more explicitly in The Dead Class and his subsequent work. This early, key experience in occupied Kraków will be shown to relate to Kantor’s reading of the work of the Jewish graphic artist and short- story writer Schulz, whose own aesthetic strategies of inverting dominant ontological hierarchies can be seen to inform Kantor’s own artistic practice. Implicit in this strategy is again a critique of a representational ontology that prioritizes a substantialist concept of being over the more dynamic and mutable concepts of becoming and seeming—a reading of reality that Schulz championed. In his performative and theatrical staging of various avant-garde approaches, Kantor can be seen to challenge conventional ontological hierarchies in a way that—following Nietzsche and Heidegger—articulates the anxieties of twentieth-century Modernism in a fundamental way. In doing so, Kantor’s work both echoes Schulz’s metaphysics and prefigures a sense of the immanence of life as elaborated in the work of Gilles Deleuze
Performance‘The Place of Time’ uses choreography, writing, composition and improvisation to weave... more Performance‘The Place of Time’ uses choreography, writing, composition and improvisation to weave a performance around movement, sound and text. It reveals the interdependence of each source and their points of departure. Jo Breslin and Martin Leach (DMU), and Christopher Foster (University of Wolverhampton) play with the time and place in which things may happen. Between the deadpan, the wry, and the expressive ‘The Place of Time’ becomes a question about the performance of a reality that is not what it seems. The performance borrows its title and some of its themes from an essay by Peter Galinson.* Between 1902 and 1909 Einstein worked in the Bern patent office as a technical expert evaluating electromagnetic patents concerning the regulation of time in multiple locations. To assess these documents Einstein and his colleagues stood at wooden podiums on which they examined the papers. By 1905 Einstein had produced his own papers establishing the particle theory of light (for which ...
This thesis explores ways in which the reality of Kantor’s existence at a key moment in occupied ... more This thesis explores ways in which the reality of Kantor’s existence at a key moment in occupied Krakow may be read as directly informing the genesis and development of his artistic strategies. It argues for a particular ontological understanding of human being that resonates strongly with that implied by Kantor in his work and writings. Most approaches to Kantor have either operated from within a native perspective that assumes familiarity with Polish culture and its influences, or, from an Anglo-American theatre-history perspective that has tended to focus on his larger-scale performance work. This has meant that contextual factors informing Kantor’s work as a whole, including his happenings, paintings, and writings, as well as his theatrical works, have remained under-explored. The thesis takes a Heideggerian-hermeneutic approach that foregrounds biographical, cultural and aesthetic contexts specific to Kantor, but seemingly alien to Anglo-American experience. Kantor’s work is ap...
First performed at conference: Dance Fields: Staking a Claim for Dance Studies in the 21st Centur... more First performed at conference: Dance Fields: Staking a Claim for Dance Studies in the 21st Century (19-22 April 2017) University of Roehampton. Further developed and performed as part of the Cultural Exchanges Festival (26 February - 2 March 2018) DMU.
On the eighth of April 1978 Tadeusz Kantor was awarded the Rembrandt Prize for outstanding contri... more On the eighth of April 1978 Tadeusz Kantor was awarded the Rembrandt Prize for outstanding contributions to art. It might be expected that an artist, upon public recognition of his greatness, would have something to say concerning the essence of his art that might aid public understanding. However, Kantor's presentation of this manifesto represents a somewhat puzzling performance. Instead of thanking the international panel of the Goethe Foundation for the award, Kantor painted a strange picture of the artist ‘on trial’. The manifesto appears to end with a sort of disappearing act: Kantor stands before his audience and makes seemingly profound statements about fear and the nature of the artist; he attempts to redefine Dada for his audience and suddenly finds that he has turned himself into the accused, has become a schoolboy once again, has forgotten what he had to say and appears to fade away to the nothingness of the closing ellipsis.This discussion uses Kantor's ‘Little M...
Congress on Research in Dance Conference Proceedings, 2009
This paper will attempt a reformulation of the concept of “feeling” in dance from a psychophysica... more This paper will attempt a reformulation of the concept of “feeling” in dance from a psychophysical perspective using ideas derived from F. M. Alexander and post-Heideggerian philosophy. It will seek to rearticulate the nature of human being as one that is vibrantly suspended between conscious subjectivity and a world illuminated by that consciousness. Viewed in this way, current prevailing ideas about “feeling” can be set aside and the practices of creation and spectatorship in dance can be reunited in a new way through a fresh understanding that takes into account the unreliability of “feeling” and its physiological and subjective reality.
This chapter will argue that in order to understand Tadeusz Kantor’s relationship to, and place i... more This chapter will argue that in order to understand Tadeusz Kantor’s relationship to, and place in, twentieth-century Modernism, it is necessary to understand his inherently poetic and philosophical approach to his practice as an artist. As with other artists for whom the Second World War was a formative experience, Kantor’s particular aesthetic strategies are evidently profoundly influenced by his wartime experience. However, for Kantor this did not happen as a simple linear narrative in his artistic development. Until the 1970s, his experience can be understood to have been continually refracted through his engagement with a succession of international contemporary art practices. Each of Kantor’s encounters with a foreign art movement—Constructivism and abstraction, Surrealism, informel, “zero,” emballage, happening—was transformed in his hands through its intersection with his underlying concerns. As such, separate and, on the surface, seemingly disparate movements acquire a certain homogeneity as they are each détourned by Kantor in his struggles to articulate a poetics of being. As a consequence of his personal operation of them, these individual avant-garde artistic strategies are each turned into vehicles for each other. In this way, and certainly when viewed retrospectively, all of Kantor’s work can be seen to be expressive of certain tendencies from Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism and informel; it is all, in a sense, “impossible,” all “packaged,” all concerned with the “zero” or “nothing” of being, and all concerned with the immediacy and aleatoricism of the happening. With The Dead Class in 1975, Kantor began to leave such explicit engagement with, and personalization of, existing art forms behind. Nevertheless, his ability to consistently bend existing artistic practice to his own purpose is an intrinsic part of the process that led to his later work. The continuous element underlying this process is Kantor’s concern with the paradoxical nature of human being, what the contemporary, post-Heideggerian Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben would later characterize (following Hegel) as “this negative being”— “the thing existing which is not when it is, and is when it is not: a half-glimpsed becoming” (Agamben 2007: 107). Death is the negative side of this “half-glimpsed becoming.” This “negative being” is, in Heidegger’s words, the “placeholder,” or the “lieutenant of the nothing” (Heidegger 1968: 37, and 1998: 93). This chapter will explore in more detail the metaphysical underpinnings of the paradoxical “negative being” of human being in Kantor’s work. Firstly, I will examine the origins of Kantor’s engagement with art informel and argue that his interest with this form may derive from an underlying sense of informe peculiar to Polish Modernism that is embodied in the work of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Witold Gombrowicz, and Bruno Schulz, as much as from the artists he encountered in his trips to Paris in 1948 and 1955. I will then discuss this in relation to Kantor’s détournement of the various avant-gardes that he experimented with during the 1950s and 1960s. In doing so I will show how Kantor’s reflection on aspects of his wartime work surfaces in the late 1960s in a way that prefigures certain key concerns that emerge more explicitly in The Dead Class and his subsequent work. This early, key experience in occupied Kraków will be shown to relate to Kantor’s reading of the work of the Jewish graphic artist and short- story writer Schulz, whose own aesthetic strategies of inverting dominant ontological hierarchies can be seen to inform Kantor’s own artistic practice. Implicit in this strategy is again a critique of a representational ontology that prioritizes a substantialist concept of being over the more dynamic and mutable concepts of becoming and seeming—a reading of reality that Schulz championed. In his performative and theatrical staging of various avant-garde approaches, Kantor can be seen to challenge conventional ontological hierarchies in a way that—following Nietzsche and Heidegger—articulates the anxieties of twentieth-century Modernism in a fundamental way. In doing so, Kantor’s work both echoes Schulz’s metaphysics and prefigures a sense of the immanence of life as elaborated in the work of Gilles Deleuze
Performance‘The Place of Time’ uses choreography, writing, composition and improvisation to weave... more Performance‘The Place of Time’ uses choreography, writing, composition and improvisation to weave a performance around movement, sound and text. It reveals the interdependence of each source and their points of departure. Jo Breslin and Martin Leach (DMU), and Christopher Foster (University of Wolverhampton) play with the time and place in which things may happen. Between the deadpan, the wry, and the expressive ‘The Place of Time’ becomes a question about the performance of a reality that is not what it seems. The performance borrows its title and some of its themes from an essay by Peter Galinson.* Between 1902 and 1909 Einstein worked in the Bern patent office as a technical expert evaluating electromagnetic patents concerning the regulation of time in multiple locations. To assess these documents Einstein and his colleagues stood at wooden podiums on which they examined the papers. By 1905 Einstein had produced his own papers establishing the particle theory of light (for which ...
This thesis explores ways in which the reality of Kantor’s existence at a key moment in occupied ... more This thesis explores ways in which the reality of Kantor’s existence at a key moment in occupied Krakow may be read as directly informing the genesis and development of his artistic strategies. It argues for a particular ontological understanding of human being that resonates strongly with that implied by Kantor in his work and writings. Most approaches to Kantor have either operated from within a native perspective that assumes familiarity with Polish culture and its influences, or, from an Anglo-American theatre-history perspective that has tended to focus on his larger-scale performance work. This has meant that contextual factors informing Kantor’s work as a whole, including his happenings, paintings, and writings, as well as his theatrical works, have remained under-explored. The thesis takes a Heideggerian-hermeneutic approach that foregrounds biographical, cultural and aesthetic contexts specific to Kantor, but seemingly alien to Anglo-American experience. Kantor’s work is ap...
First performed at conference: Dance Fields: Staking a Claim for Dance Studies in the 21st Centur... more First performed at conference: Dance Fields: Staking a Claim for Dance Studies in the 21st Century (19-22 April 2017) University of Roehampton. Further developed and performed as part of the Cultural Exchanges Festival (26 February - 2 March 2018) DMU.
On the eighth of April 1978 Tadeusz Kantor was awarded the Rembrandt Prize for outstanding contri... more On the eighth of April 1978 Tadeusz Kantor was awarded the Rembrandt Prize for outstanding contributions to art. It might be expected that an artist, upon public recognition of his greatness, would have something to say concerning the essence of his art that might aid public understanding. However, Kantor's presentation of this manifesto represents a somewhat puzzling performance. Instead of thanking the international panel of the Goethe Foundation for the award, Kantor painted a strange picture of the artist ‘on trial’. The manifesto appears to end with a sort of disappearing act: Kantor stands before his audience and makes seemingly profound statements about fear and the nature of the artist; he attempts to redefine Dada for his audience and suddenly finds that he has turned himself into the accused, has become a schoolboy once again, has forgotten what he had to say and appears to fade away to the nothingness of the closing ellipsis.This discussion uses Kantor's ‘Little M...
Congress on Research in Dance Conference Proceedings, 2009
This paper will attempt a reformulation of the concept of “feeling” in dance from a psychophysica... more This paper will attempt a reformulation of the concept of “feeling” in dance from a psychophysical perspective using ideas derived from F. M. Alexander and post-Heideggerian philosophy. It will seek to rearticulate the nature of human being as one that is vibrantly suspended between conscious subjectivity and a world illuminated by that consciousness. Viewed in this way, current prevailing ideas about “feeling” can be set aside and the practices of creation and spectatorship in dance can be reunited in a new way through a fresh understanding that takes into account the unreliability of “feeling” and its physiological and subjective reality.
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