Gregory Volk
Meal for the Rich and the Poor
The entire trajectory of Ryszard Wasko’s career has comprised a substantial, in many ways risk-taking and innovative, extension and enlargement of the role of the artist. It is impossible, for instance, to separate his activities as an artist (as a maker of installations, as a creator of paintings and works on paper) from his other endeavors as a curator, organizer, teacher, writer, agitator, and charismatic force for renewal in both a domestic and international arts situation that often seems over-bureaucratized and crusty with all sorts of hierarchies. In Wasko’s case, there is a seamless integration between all of these things, which are all facets of the same broadly humanistic and democratic vision. He is, in fact, one of those figures who consistently shakes things up and pushes the borders of the possible, certainly with a sense of mission, but also with humor and verve.
There are, of course, precedents for the kind of multifaceted role that Wasko has assumed: Joseph Beuys, in Germany, springs to mind as do Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark in America. Wladyslaw Strzeminski, especially, springs to mind, whose utopian vision, articulated in Wasko’s adopted home city of Lodz, Poland during the heyday of Polish Constructivism in the 1920’s and 30’s (oftentimes under considerable duress), centered around a live and crackling museum that would not merely mount exhibitions but would also be a human forum for a vigorous exchange between artists, as well as between artists and the public at large. Years later, this vision abides as a reference point for Wasko in his own activities- it’s one among many reference points, but an important one nonetheless. Many of his own curatorial activities have focused on art exhibitions that also double as rich human forums. They’re bone fide exhibitions, but they’re also complex meeting-grounds between people that dispense with the kind of built-in distances that normally occur as a matter of course, between, say, established and emerging artists, between artists who are supported by a great deal of art world infrastructure and those who do not enjoy such support, and between artists from the West and the East.
Regarding, for a moment, Ryszard Wasko’s art objects, two things immediately stand out: first the way his works strive for a direct encounter with, for want of a better term, the world out there, and secondly the way they also strive to elicit a moment of catharsis. For many years, austere, yet gorgeous, works on paper have been a big part of Wasko’s oeuvre. While these works refer to painting, they rarely make use of paint; instead they consist of elemental materials like charcoal and ashes, mercury and gold, soil and salt. One of the things that Wasko accomplishes with these works is to bring – quite literally – the stuff of the world into the field of a drawing or painting, and to break down the status of an art work as a discrete or autonomous object. What Wasko actually comes up with can be lyrical and probing, exalted and ceremonial, but there is always this mineral quality tying things closely to the earth and to world processes or regeneration and decay.
A number of things seem pertinent in terms of Wasko’s actual aesthetic. There is an interest not really in Minimalism but in minimal forms – a solitary, hovering rectangle, for instance, or three slender, vertical black rectangles upon a white background, which have a pronounced austerity, but also an austere elegance. Within such works, there are always handmade, and hand-drawn, elements that subtly turn what could otherwise be a rigid and impersonal geometric shape into something that’s very personal and idiosyncratic; there is a testing of delineations, wavering and fluctuating notes at the edges. You can also detect the groundbeat of Polish Constructivism with its interest in transcendent geometries, as well as another, far older, source, although in a much transformed way: namely Eastern European icon paintings and objects, especially in the way that Wasko ascribes an almost talismanic or vibrational power to his chosen materials.
Occurring side by side with his works on paper are Wasko’s sculptural and installational pieces. For the exhibition Shattered Latitudes, curated by myself in 1996 at Lombard-Fried Fine Arts in New York, he contributed a work consisting of rectangular columns of paraffin atop a smattering of small, obviously handmade wooden carts (Child Territories, 1996). At the top of each column, pressed into its surface and then sealed beneath a layer of wax, there were flags of nations and countries that Wasko has recently visited – a sort of personal United Nations culled from his own immediate experience. The whole work, scattered as ten pieces through the gallery, seemed willfully casual and decidedly non-monumental. It suggested, in fact, the ardor and neglect of a child’s outdoor playthings strewn on the ground, much more than expensive, built-for-ever sculpture, which is entirely apt, because the piece referred to a game played by Polish children not long after the second World War, in which they would use carts built by hand out of found materials, and piles of snow, to simulate the maneuvers of armies.
With this game as his source (and by extension his own personal memory, as well as Polish national memory) Wasko created a context in which flags, and the nations they represent, and the intractable conflicts that they also represent, suddenly become whimsical, playful, and drained of their ferocity. At the same time, all those implicit territorial claims and corresponding slugfests between peoples, were essentially declared null and void. This particular piece was intended to be casual, but it was also visually dazzling – all of those small white columns, reminiscent of pristine snow, had a glowing presence in the gallery and the national flags were bursts of pure, lyrical colors. Others of Wasko’s sculptures almost always contain a pronounced aspect of visual dazzle. A good example is his room-sized installation of plastic roses at Zacheta in Warsaw. Here, the accumulating power of dozens and in fact hundreds of plastic flowers had a space-transforming presence, in a word, beauty, which emerged unexpectedly from an unlikely, low-level source.
During the past few years an international trend (or sub-trend) has emerged, especially among younger artists, who turn the forum of an exhibition into something that has an ulterior role, oftentimes taken directly from daily life. Exhibitions as dinners, offices, stores, and various other service-oriented themes have become quite important, but here it’s interesting to consider Ryszard Wasko’s own meal events which both substantially predate all of this, and approach it from a quite different perspective. In 1993, at the Wschodnia Gallery in Lodz, Wasko presented an event called A Meal for the Rich and the Poor. In one room, dozens of crimson candles were fastened horizontally to the walls as a kind of all-over grid; in another room the walls were coated with dark oil. At one point, the candles were lit, which emblazoned the room, and which turned it into a kind of loopy (if very temporary) cathedral, while soup from a pot of borscht was served to the audience. Suddenly, this simple action of public meal took on all sorts of ceremonial and metaphorical resonance, although once again in the most casual and off-handed of ways. Without much fanfare, the entire context of the gallery was transformed in the direction of generosity and communion. Another interesting thing: the soup (a delectable borscht prepared by Wasko himself) was the same color as the candles. Visually speaking, it was as much a part of the exhibition as anything else.
This was only one of dozens of times when Wasko has performed such an action with soup. Obviously, turning a gallery or museum into a site for a shared meal (prepared by the artist) overturns all kinds of roles – of the artist, the audience, and the venue. Just as obviously, Wasko is well aware of this, but what’s especially compelling is how he doesn’t focus on art worldish questions of recon-textualization and economy. These are not, in other words, canny raids on a gallery with an eye toward being subversive, but instead really do have to do with soup, with cooking, with generosity and conviviality, and with offering sustenance as a clear gesture of human bonding. These events by Wasko never seem staged or arranged; its the simplicity of it all that makes them so mythic, and the humanity of it all that makes them so engaging. As a curator, Ryszard Wasko is heavily identified with the ongoing series of international exhibitions called Construction in Process – he is, in fact, the primary impetus for these exhibitions and has been so since the beginning. The first such exhibition, held in Lodz in 1981 during the height of the Solidarity movement, has understandably received a great deal of acclaim: it was an important, and in fact crucial, event in the Polish arts scene of that era. Yet what is of particular interest to me is not only this important historical event, but the scope and character of later events, organized by Wasko, which are in some deep sense indebted to this special history, but which have taken those energies and developed them, oftentimes in surprising and fruitful ways.
As near as I can determine it – and I have been privileged to attend and participate in several Construction in Process exhibitions – what remains essential is how these art events are flooded, so to speak, with life, and in ways that you very rarely find in other large exhibitions. Typically, they involve not only the display of finished art works, but also the process by which the works were made, the unfettered human exchange occurring between the artists during the installation process – which can be sloppy and exalted, brilliant and ridiculous – as well as between the artists and the public at large. For many participants, even artists who have been in dozens of international exhibitions, these events can be especially memorable and cathartic, exactly the kind of thing that you might have often wished for, but rarely, if ever, found.
Once again, these events involve a considerable prescience. One of the more welcome additions to the international arts scene during the past several years has been the rise of large events and biennials in places far from the normal power centers of the world., such as Istanbul, Johannesburg, and Kwangju, Korea. And one of the promising things about these exhibitions are how they tend to be comparatively more free-spirited and risk-taking than other, hugely famous exhibition which are a lot more involved with questions of art world power; also how they tend to foster a direct engagement between the participants. The thing about exhibitions organized by Wasko (with others) – really the spectacular quality of Construction in Process events – is how they take this free-spirited communion and push it to the extreme, to the point where it becomes an essential part of the whole event, something bound into its very character. In a contemporary arts context that is often fractious, as well as humanly daunting, these transformative events remain necessary and crucial.
From
Ryszard Wasko
Selected works 1986-2000
The International Artists’ Museum
Many H. Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
December 22 2000 – January 5, 2001
Exhibition catalogue, pp. 7-8.
