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Section:
Documents of Art
Andrzej Pierzgalski (1938-2016) founded and ran the A4 Gallery in ŁódĽ in the 1970s. A gallery dedicated to him was opened in 2012 in the Art and Documentation journal. Since 2018 the gallery has been curated by Leszek Brogowski.
After the Second World War, a rapid process of deconstruction of the traditional concept of a work of art took place: process and information replaced the material object; documents replacing the work of art referred to the working process rather than the creative act; the intellectualization of artistic processes is opposed to aesthetic fanaticism; discretion, moderation and restraint are contrasted to lavishness, spectacle and exaggeration, especially on the art market, etc. One of the most interesting places where the clear contours of the concept of a work of art have blurred, is precisely its border with the document. Yet art historians often distinguish the work of art as the proper subject of research, and accompanying documents, such as: an order, a contract for a work, a notarial document, etc., as only a material accompanying the research. In reference to many practices of contemporary art, this distinction can no longer be applied, because a work can now take the form of a document, and a document can replace a work; often these two functions overlap or coexist. In the work Document (1963), to a work inspired by Marcel Duchamp's notes, Robert Morris added the notarial act - Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal - by virtue of which he withdrew all aesthetic qualities from it; if this document is disconnected from the work of art and considered only as a supplement to it, the work of art will completely change its character. You can even ask yourself if the work of art is not just a specific document and a trace of the artistic process. The program of the Documents of Art Gallery will be focused, however, on printed documents: not on the so-called artistic prints, but on documents with industrial offset, photocopy and even hand-folded, rubber fonts, or mechanical reproduction techniques, which Walter Benjamin writes at the beginning of his essay: "The enormous changes brought about in literature by movable type, the technological reproduction of writing, are well known. But they are only a special case, though an important one, of the phenomenon considered here from the perspective of world history. In the course of the Middle Ages the woodcut was supplemented by engraving and etching, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century by lithography." [1] Well, the offset is just an improved and industrialized lithography, where the zinc plates replaced heavy lithographic stone, thus enabling mass printing of photographs. The use of industrial printing as the basis for documents of art (manifests, artistic magazines, artists' books, catalogues, leaflets, invitations, visual poetry, etc.) has become an impulse for profound changes not only in artistic practices, but also - as Benjamin predicted - in the very notion of art. Art documents presented here will therefore be an opportunity to trace the most important stages and aspects of these changes.
[1] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, translated by Edmund ]ephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others (Cambridge, Mass., London: The Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press, 2008), 20.
Submit your proposal to this Section to: Leszek Brogowski, email: leszek.brogowski@univ-rennes2.fr
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