Muzyka: Eugeniusz Rudnik
Józef Robakowski
"An integral part of Robakowski's work are his statements and
self-commentaries, as well as numerous programming texts and manifestoes, e.g.
Calling Once Again for 'Pure Film' (1971), Video Art - a Chance to Approach
Reality (1976), or Manipulating! (1988).
"Robakowski made his first experimental film in 1962, 6,000,000, a compilation of fragments of Holocaust-era documentaries. Photographic activity dominated the early period of his practice, also as part of the collective Zero-61..... According to Robakowski, the group drew inspiration from the "tradition of metaphorical montage known from interwar painting, photography, and avant-garde cinema." During that time, besides various photographic experiments (e.g. Photo-Painting, 1958-1967; double-exposure photographs employing mirror-image composition), Robakowski made photo-objects, such as Colander (1960), the photograph of a colander nailed to a plank.
"One of Zero-61's most important presentations was an independent exhibition at a deserted smithy in 1969, where instead of photographs the viewer encountered 'objects for photographing'.
"Between 1965-1967, Robakowski was also active on the collective Grupa Krąg, which brought together visual artists, filmmakers, poets, sculptors, and photographers. The artist remembered: These exhibitions were like quasi-theatrical happenings, with all kinds of actions, 'tricks', transforming exhibition presentations into spectacles (...) I was closest to a simulated character that didn't really exist, and its name was Józef Korbiela. Józef Robakowski
"The smithy exhibition took place at a time when Robakowski was already studying in Łódź. There, in 1970, the Workshop of Film Form (Warsztat Formy Filmowej) was founded, initially within the framework of the Student Science Club of the National Film School in Łódź, active through around 1977. The Workshop's practice, focuses on an analysis of the new media language (photography, film, video), drew its inspirations from the constructivist tradition and conceptualism, striving to get film rid of 'alien elements' (anecdote, literary forms, narration) and make its language simpler and information denser. The artist's analytical position at the time was also manifested in his interest in the peculiarities of human perception towards the still cameras and film cameras, in questions about these tools as extensions of the human organism's mental and physiological functions.
"During this time, from 1974, Robakowski also embraced a new medium - video. The move away from the traditional forms of filmic narration often went hand in hand with a rejection of the representational function. The non-camera film Test II (1971) is among the most radical statements against the narrativity and illusiveness of the traditional filmic message, made by puncturing a dark film tape, as a result of which the viewer was 'attacked' by a strong beam of projector light, producing the effect of afterimage. During a festival in Knokke-Heist in Belgium in 1971, Robakowski enhanced the effect by using a mirror to reflect the projector light towards the audience (Test I).
"Light also played an important role in many of the artist's later works, such as 1, 2, 3, 4... (1992), or Attention: Light! (2004), made in collaboration with Wiesław Michalak, with a score by composer Paul Sharits, and music by Fryderyk Chopin. In the 1971 manifesto Calling Once Again for 'Pure Film', the artist wrote, Currently the subject of my work is eliminating from film elements characteristic for literature. I am aware that such a conception constrains my freedom of action, raises artificial barriers, and leads me to the peripheries of the genre. I believe however, or rather, am convinced, that through various kinds of experiments, trials, propositions, I will succeed in freeing film from the ballast of habits adopted from literature, uncritically accepted almost universally by both filmmakers and viewers. The question the Workshop of Film Form artists were asking was therefore one about whether there exists a language appropriate for the film medium.
"The first piece made as part of WFF was Robakowski's Market Square (1970), an animated film compiled with still images of the Łódź market square, Czerwony Rynek, made every five seconds on a single day between 7 am and 4 p.m. In the film, that time was compressed to five minutes.
"An important aspect of Robakowski's WFF work were experiments with image and sound - an extra soundtrack, asynchronicity of sound and image, or their mutual relation. The artist experimented with them in Próba II (1971), juxtaposing intense red colour with classic organ music.
"In Dynamic Rectangle (1971), Robakowski manually shaped a rectangle to music by Eugeniusz Rudnik. The issue of the relation between sound and image returned frequently in the artist's oeuvre, including the films Videosongs (1992) and Videokisses (1992). Józef Robakowski’s Own Cinema at CSW - Image Gallery 1 / 13
"Since 1978 Robakowski has run Exchange Gallery (Galeria Wymiany), a private gallery of recent art featuring leaflets, films, videos, objects, photographs, books, posters, documentations, and all kinds of publications, both the artist's own and donated by other artists. The guiding idea of Exchange Gallery is to 'exchange artistic ideas, cause ferment, and stimulate creative initiatives'.
"In 1987, Robakowski photographed himself - or, rather, his chest - with objects from the collection, creating the Fetishes series. Exchange Gallery was also responsible for initiating a number of important artistic initiatives - exhibitions, symposiums, publications, particularly in the 1980s.....
"Since the 1970s, an important role has been played in Robakowski's art by his concept of art as a field of energy transmissions. Hence he has focused in many of his works, which are often biological-mechanical recordings, on issues such as vitality or energy resulting from the contact with a tool. The film are often an effect of an encounter between the mechanical camera and the human body, a confrontation between man and medium
""I want to tell you all that art is energy", Robakowski says, jumping out of water in his Energy Manifesto (2003), as if paraphrasing and referring to a conception by Andrzej Pawłowski, who claimed that "art is an energy field".
"Robakowski wrote in 1977, For many years I have been studying the relationship between my psychophysical organism and the devices I make mechanical recordings with (film camera, still camera, video camera, tape recorder). These studies have resulted in a sense that technological inventions are of fundamental significance, because they make it possible to convey my psychophysical states, my temperament and consciousness, to tape.
"The best example of this may be the film Walking, made during the Workshop of Film Form period (1973), recording the artist's climb up the stairs of a parachute tower. In the single-sequence film, growing increasingly tired, he counts off steps from one to two hundred.
"In 1975, Robakowski started a series of works called Energetic Angles, which, as he says, reflect my fascination with the problem of the existence of 'Angles' as a kind of intuitive geometry. (...) I've been wondering to what extent geometry, whose goals are intended to be purely practical, can function in art. For the problem to gain significance, I've decided to establish the Angles as an energetic culture sign in the form of a personal fetish.
"Energy fields have also been realised in Robakowski's art in other ways. In the 1980s, he made films based on recordings of rock concerts, especially his favourite band, the punk group Moskwa. In 1989, in the film My Videomasochisms, he mocked self-mutilating tactics of performance artists: during a for-camera performance, he manipulated various tools next to his face, inflicting a kind of torture on himself.
"In 1996, in a TV studio, he carried out a happening, broadcast live, during which he was connected to electricity, asking viewers to increase the voltage (I Am Electric). Most recently, in 2008, the artist introduced, as Energy Manifesto, the vastness of the Niagara Falls in the space of Galeria Atlas Sztuki in Łódź. The artist said in an interview given prior to the exhibition's opening, "This is to be a laboratory-like, artificial situation, but favourable for the person willing to spend time in it. The viewer's contemplative bliss, despite the powerful audiovisual energy, is to be guaranteed by a stylistic figure I call monotony".
"In the early 1980s, Robakowski introduced yet another term explaining his practice - 'personal cinema', that is, one based on the observation of one's immediate surroundings as well as 'self-observation'. He wrote in 1981, "So let's keep filming everything, and it will turn out we're always filming ourselves. Such a filmed and filming individual lives fully only on screen and while his physique is similar to yours, his character and personality are different. It is extremely interesting that you can polemicise with yourself via the screen. So keep filming and keep looking closely and critically with a sense that you on screen are more wonderful than in nature, because you are better able to remember the past. Finally, take into account the fact that your memory often becomes the viewer's memory."
"At the time when Robakowski wrote these words, he had already begun shooting footage for From My Window (1978-1999), a collection of camera observations of the courtyard of the artist's tenement in a part of Łódź known as Manhattan, recording the residents and the changes occurring in the space over the years. The film ends with images of the construction of a hotel that is to ultimately obscure the view from Robakowski's window. The moving video About Fingers (1982) is, in turn, a kind of biography, told for each finger separately (with the characteristic independent narrator from Robakowski's works delivering a background monologue), and at the same time, a 'self-observation document', revealing the private and subjective. Patricia Grzonka notes that, given the piece's historical context and the artist's personal situation at the time - he had just been fired from his teaching position - About Fingers "can also be interpreted as a metaphor of the political situation of the era, a manifesto of the artist's withdrawal at a time of his exclusion from public life".
"Of similarly private nature was My Theatre (1985), enacted for the camera by the artist's hands and fingers, again accompanied by an off-screen monologue.....
https://culture.pl/en/artist/jozef-robakowski
