Skip to main content
Read page text
page 16
Strzemiński, had taught in the building attached to the block of flats in which I lived. If I propped myself up in bed in my two-room flat, my back would be resting against the wall on the other side of which Strzemiński gave lessons fifty years earlier. Strzemiński was one inspiration for the Workshop of Film Form and the anarchist grouping Łódź Kaliska. Both took as their subject matter daily life: its apparent absurdity under Polish state socialism and its potential as the fundamental basis for developing a different reality – literally a homemade reality – as the beginning of a psychological and social reordering of existence that was both independent and collectivist. The making and showing of art became a form of direct action with strong political implications. Cooperation was the oxygen of both movements, which overlapped, and communication with artists and audiences abroad was a crucial encouragement and stimulus. As a native English speaker, I was able to write critiques of films that were sent or taken abroad for screening in Western Europe or the USA. My first attempts in the analysis of visual and plastic, as opposed to verbal, artefacts were made inside a milieu of art-making. It was a form of cooperation that taught me the value and effectiveness of collaboration. Writing out of collaborations with other artists and writers is something I have sought out ever since, and has been reflected in films and exhibitions, as well as in many of the essays gathered here. My three years in Poland were punctuated by trips back to England twice a year. These would be undertaken by car over two or three days, with long waits at the border between Poland and East Germany, and sometimes between East and West Berlin. I would reach West Berlin by nightfall and would stay in the Kant Hotel in Kantstrasse, not far from the KantGaragen, the classic modernist building used by Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin to store weapons; a few blocks 8
page 17
down from the location of the political cabaret, Wilde Bühne, and the Theater des Westens, where Marlene Dietrich first gave voice to the song ‘Falling in love again / Never wanted to’. The hotel was close to the bookshop Hedayat, run by Abbas Maroufi, and a few doors down from the site of the notorious prison housing women members of the Rote Kapelle, the antiNazi resistance movement. It was also where Franz Hessel stayed. Hessel was the friend who helped Walter Benjamin translate Proust; who even, after returning to Germany, stayed imaginatively in Paris, as Franz Blei records: ‘I meet him in Munich, the sun is shining but he’s got his umbrella open and his trousers rolled up. But why, Herr Hesssel? – It’s raining in Paris, he says’. Hessel looked both ways at once – and the Kantstrasse became the staging post from which I looked in both directions, East and West. By stages, it became correlated in my mind with an ethical imperative – or perhaps it was more of an emotional imperative – to look both ways in art, and to think about how the fundamental urgencies of artmaking in the East might be translated into Western European conditions and forms of expression. Much of Western art had seemed to me unpressured and even desultory; but that was partly because there was so much of it out there on show. I now tried to find where real art was hiding, even when it was hiding in plain sight. When I finally returned from Poland to work in Cambridge, I started trying to keep up with developments in art at a time when Britain seemed to have become the display cabinet for everything going on worldwide. It took me a while to get my aim in. From first to last, the essays here are the outcome of another form of cooperation; of a dialogue with generous editors and gallerists (often people combining both roles) whose encouragement and guidance has been vital. My biggest debts are to the brilliant Tim Marlow and Jill Silverman, who presented me with opportunities to write on art that I 9

Page Text

View plaintext

Strzemiński, had taught in the building attached to the block of flats in which I lived. If I propped myself up in bed in my two-room flat, my back would be resting against the wall on the other side of which Strzemiński gave lessons fifty years earlier.

Strzemiński was one inspiration for the Workshop of Film Form and the anarchist grouping Łódź Kaliska. Both took as their subject matter daily life: its apparent absurdity under Polish state socialism and its potential as the fundamental basis for developing a different reality – literally a homemade reality – as the beginning of a psychological and social reordering of existence that was both independent and collectivist. The making and showing of art became a form of direct action with strong political implications. Cooperation was the oxygen of both movements, which overlapped, and communication with artists and audiences abroad was a crucial encouragement and stimulus. As a native English speaker, I was able to write critiques of films that were sent or taken abroad for screening in Western Europe or the USA. My first attempts in the analysis of visual and plastic, as opposed to verbal, artefacts were made inside a milieu of art-making. It was a form of cooperation that taught me the value and effectiveness of collaboration. Writing out of collaborations with other artists and writers is something I have sought out ever since, and has been reflected in films and exhibitions, as well as in many of the essays gathered here.

My three years in Poland were punctuated by trips back to England twice a year. These would be undertaken by car over two or three days, with long waits at the border between Poland and East Germany, and sometimes between East and West Berlin. I would reach West Berlin by nightfall and would stay in the Kant Hotel in Kantstrasse, not far from the KantGaragen, the classic modernist building used by Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin to store weapons; a few blocks

8

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content