Exquisite Corpses Assembling Films by Polish Artists Assembling (collaborative) techniques derive from such methods of the first avant-garde as exquisite corpse (cadavre exquis). They are based on assembling into a single whole separate elements created by different authors and placing them within the framework of an organising construction. They started to be used at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, during a progressing differentiation of neo-avant-garde positions and strategies that challenged the traditional (modernistic) forms, techniques, structures and methods of functioning in the field of art (and transgressed its autonomy). Manifestations of that trend included a swing towards processual (anti-object, ephemeral, documented) practices, a strong focus on the analysis of the nature of the medial message (mechanical media, mass media), or practices challenging the concept of authorship (participative and collective practices, appropriation art, parasite art). Simultaneously, together with art critics and theoreticians, artists made attempts to redefine the function of the exhibition, subjected artistic institutions to critique, self-organised themselves. Assembling methods were one of the many ways of creating a common field of communication, of exchange, of play, and, at the same time, an attempt to capture, confront, document or collect the positions and strategies in question. The result were mail art works, independent publications (e.g. the Notatnik Robotnika Sztuki, Tango), works of music, poetry or literature, happenings, group visual games and films. The artists creating assembling films are not authors in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, they are perpetrators - they set the time and place, organise the situation, inspire others to participate. They invite selected artists (or non-artists) and give them the implements to create a short film or a visual self-presentation (its length defined by the artist-perpetrator, usually ranging between 1-3 minutes). Therefore, they play the role of curators, producers, co-creators or subcontractors (as camera operators, actors and so on). The structure of an assembling film is defined by a flowing sequence of visual 'contributions' that usually do not directly refer to each other. There also exist assembling films based on the sequential scheme of the cinematic 'statements', where each contribution is a comment on, or response to, the previous one (made by other author). This method introduces a kind of narration that bears the characteristics of a 'conversation' or 'game'. Polish assembling films were usually made within the context of a specific artistic event (the essence of which was self-organisation or quasi-sociological/pedagogical activities), such as a festival (the 5th Biennial of Spatial Forms in Elblag), an open-air workshop (Osieki '74), an exhibition (In the Centre Pompidou), or as part of an artistic group or an institution based on collective activities (Workshop of the Film Form, Studio Dziekanka gallery). They were often a collective (self-)portrait of the given artistic community, an artistic or social group. It is worth adding that, in 1981 in Budapest, during a meeting of Polish and Hungarian artists, following a screening of Polish assembling films, the idea was born of an assembling video-zine (Infermental, VHS-distributed). Lukasz Ronduda & Michal Wolinski Filmy prezentowane na wystawie: Playing on the Actress' Face (1971) - fragment of the film Open Form directed by: Przemyslaw Kwiek, Zofia Kulik, Jan S. Wojciechowski, Pawel Kwiek 22 X (1971) films by the students of Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz directed by: Józef Robakowski Activities with Others' One-minute Movies (1973) Javier Aquirre/KwieKulik, Piotr Biernacki/KwieKulik, Karol Cichecki i Pawel Kwiek/KwieKulik, xxx/KwieKulik, Istvan Sas/KwieKulik, Józef Robakowski/KwieKulik, Stanislaw Kowalski/KwieKulik KwieKulik on the basis of Kinolaboratorium film directed by Pawel Kwiek Osieki 74 (1974) Wojciech Bruszewski, Jan Dobkowski, Jan Fabich, Wojciech Krzywoblocki, Pawel Kwiek, Pawel Niedzielski, Ing Lindega, Irm Dalo Jager, Józef Robakowski, Ryszard Sienicki, Grzegorz Sztabinski, Roman Walicki, Andrzej Partum, Janusz Zagrodzki. directed: Pawel Kwiek Living Gallery (1975) Jerzy Beres, Piotr Biernacki, Wojciech Bruszewski, Zbigniew Dlubak, Pawel Freisler, Zbigniew Gostomski, Andrzej Lachowicz, Natalia LL, Antoni Mikolajczyk, Zdzislaw Jurkiewicz, Andrzej Partum, Ireneusz Pierzgalski, Janusz Polom, Leszek Przyjemski i Anastazy Wisniewski (Galeria Tak), Andrzej Rózycki, Zbigniew Warpechowski, Ryszard Wasko, Ryszard Winiarski, Krzysztof Zarebski... directed by: Józef Robakowski Construction in Process (1981) Jan Dibbets, Peter Downsborough, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Noriyuki Haraguchi, Taka Iimura, Servie Janssen, Kazuo Katase, Stanislav Kolibal, Tomasz Konart, Paul Sharits, Nancy Holt, Attila Kovacs, Pawel Kwiek, Peter Lowe, Rune Mields, Antoni Mikolajczyk, Richard Nonas, Roman Opalka, Ken Unsworth, Bernar Venet, Ryszard Wasko, Ryszard Winiarski, Józef Robakowski, Sol LeWitt, Natalia LL, Zdzislaw Piernik, Henryk Stazewski, Reiner Ruthenbeck... directed by: Józef Robakowski Theatre of Shadows (2006) Céline Ahond, Pawel Althamer, Ziad Antar, Liliana Basarab, Veaceslav Druta, Adriana García Galán, Kapwani Kiwanga, Élise Mougin, Vincent Olinet, Emilie Pitoiset, Koki Tanaka, Adam Vackar. directed by: Pawel Althamer i Jacek Taszakowski thanks to: Jacek Taszakowski (Filmotwornia)

on the images: film frames from the Living Gallery by Jozef Robakowski, 1975 contributions by: Andrzej Lachowicz Zbigniew Warpechowski Natalia LL Pawel Freisler Janusz Polom Jerzy Beres Andrzej Partum Ryszard Winiarski

Presentation of the printed matters

Piktogram #05/06 WIn the double issue, among others: games and visual conversations, activities and interactions - set of texts about participative and collective artistic practices focused on the process of active communication; from the wider perspective this material presents successive 'turns' in the intergenerational artistic game - from Oskar Hansen and Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz and their students: Przemyslaw Kwiek, Zofia Kulik, Wiktor Gutt, Waldemar Raniszewski, Jan S. Wojciechowski i Grzegorz Kowalski, to the students of the latter: Pawel Althamer and Artur Zmijewski. In the magazine also: Patrick Komorowski behind the scenes of a Theatre of Shadows which took place In the Centre Pompidou; Jan Verwoert finds heaven in a wheelchair on the Isa Genzken's exhibition; Edwin Bendyk searches for the medium; Eustachy Kossakowski inverts the images, and Konrad Pustola and Mikolaj Dlugosz invert the notion of an author. The next issue comming soon...

"1, 2, 3... Awangarda" is a book contains texts on Polish neo-avant-garde of the 1970s by David Crowley, David Curtis and Steven Ball, Anselm Franke, Lukasz Ronduda, Leire Vergara, Jan Verwoert, Axel j. Wieder, Michal Wolinski. The authors analyse, among others: pop trends, soc-art, post-Hansenian participative games and interactions, analytical tendencies, contextualism, structural cinema, relations between cinema and experimental film. The book contains also extensive Archive section with the descriptions of the films made by Polish artists from the 1930s to the 1980s, as well as presentations of works by contemporary artists, who refer in their artistic practice to the heritage of the neo-avant-garde (Jonathan Monk, Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij, Judith Hopf, Matthew Buckingham, Wilhelm Sasnal, Artur Zmijewski, Pawel Althamer, Igor Krenz and Florian Zeyfang).