Photograph: Eustachy Kossakowski © Anka Ptaszkowska and archive of Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Courtesy Paulina Krasinska and Foksal Gallery Foundation.
Peer Review: Edward KrasinskiCurator Kasia Redzisz on the surreal wit of the avant-garde artist.
Peer Review: Edward KrasinskiCurator Kasia Redzisz on the surreal wit of the avant-garde artist.
( 1 ) Edward Krasinski describes his performance of Spear, staged in the fields in Zalesie, near Warsaw in 1964: “Spears hung from the wires stretched between the trees created an illusion of movement. They were swishing [in the air]. It was all about preparing the spear to perform its function. Once prepared it could act on its own.” When displayed indoors, the linear sculptures hang in the gallery in perfect equilibrium between motion and stillness. They evoke movement and play with our senses. The illusion is achieved with the simplest of means: through the use of color and fragmentation. Reduced to a single line, they exemplify Krasinski’s desire to deny sculpture its classical monumentality. They are perfect props in the artist’s mis-en-scènes.
Edward Krasinski (1925–2004) was one of the most important artists of the European post-war avant-garde. He sought to reduce sculpture to a mere line, epitomized by his use of blue adhesive tape, which he placed at a height of 130 centimeters across his installation works. “I encompass everything with it and go everywhere,” he once explained. “This is art, or is it?”
The blue tape extends across walls and objects in his Warsaw studio, which has been preserved as he left it. When I first visited the studio—in an apartment on the top floor of an ordinary block of flats from the communist era—I found myself surprised and confused. Years later, curating Krasinski’s retrospective at Tate Modern and then the Stedelijk, I wanted visitors to feel the same while discovering his complex, yet delightfully playful practice. The interior is full of little traps and visual pranks. A coatrack in the hallway has been replaced by a pitchfork sticking out of the wall, hanging too high for anyone to reach it. The envelope lying on the floor is glued there, so no one can pick it up. There is a dry branch sprouting out of the parquet floor and fake mice are hidden in the corners of rooms (the mouse traps are real, though). A metal fin cuts through the table and a water tap is installed purposelessly in the living room.
On closer inspection, the bookshelf reveals itself to be a large photograph of the original item of furniture, which stands behind its photographic reproduction. In this studio-cum-apartment, the border between reality and its crooked mirror image is blurred.
The tension between the real and the imagined is crucial in understanding Krasinski’s treatment of exhibition spaces as well as domestic ones. From the mid-1960s, his shows often took the form of total environments: stage sets, where beautifully conceptual artworks resembled props ready to be deployed. Spaces masterfully transformed by the artist contained the suggestion that something was about to happen. Stepping into his exhibitions meant to suspend disbelief and become a participant in an unscripted performance. By detaching the artist and the viewer from the world outside, Krasinski’s practice assumed the role of an alibi, offering the possibility of being “somewhere else” at any given moment.
( 1 ) Edward Krasinski describes his performance of Spear, staged in the fields in Zalesie, near Warsaw in 1964: “Spears hung from the wires stretched between the trees created an illusion of movement. They were swishing [in the air]. It was all about preparing the spear to perform its function. Once prepared it could act on its own.” When displayed indoors, the linear sculptures hang in the gallery in perfect equilibrium between motion and stillness. They evoke movement and play with our senses. The illusion is achieved with the simplest of means: through the use of color and fragmentation. Reduced to a single line, they exemplify Krasinski’s desire to deny sculpture its classical monumentality. They are perfect props in the artist’s mis-en-scènes.
