Fugitives from Culture: The Polish Neo-Avant-Garde and Beyond.
Berlin: Penka Rare Books and Archives, 2024. 132 pp. Fully illustrated. Texts by Vera Koshkina, Friedrich Haufe, Philipp Penka. Layout and photography by Markéta Cramer von Laue. ISBN: 978-3-9826154-0-0. Item #54284
"Fugitives from Culture" is not only a richly illustrated exhibition and rare book catalog, but also a comprehensive introductory documentation of unofficial art in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s, based on difficult-to-access, mostly handmade artists' books, magazines, multiples, posters and other ephemera, as well as photographs, drawings and autographs. Art-historical interest in the still largely unexplored underground art behind the Iron Curtain is growing. These groups saw themselves less as "avant-gardes" and more as "fugitives from culture" who worked outside the established cultural institutions in East and West. Various groups developed new practices for producing, showing, critiquing, and archiving art.
The "PERMAFO" group - to which Natalia LL also belonged - for example, did not see their catalog publications as secondary products, but conversely as primary exhibitions that were to circulate freely, independent of spatial and institutional conditions. The NET initiative, co-founded by the conceptualist Jarosław Kozłowski, initiated an international exchange of artistic ideas by mail and organized pop-up exhibitions. The NET manifesto programmatically opposed the organizational form of the network, consisting of alternately interacting senders and recipients, to the free market on the one hand and the planned economy bureaucracy on the other. "NET" wanted to promote a structure within the art world that was decentralized, open, and non-commercial.
With the imposition of martial law in December 1981, new paths had to be found. The neo-Dadaist collective "Łódź Kaliska" had already been founded, from which the group "Kultura Zrzuty" eventually emerged - a small circle whose activities took place exclusively in the attic of an apartment building. They collectively produced "Tango", a series of limited artist's books. Each edition served as exhibition, catalog, and archive in one. Similar initiatives emerged elsewhere. For example, the "Luxus" group was founded at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw. Under the same name, it also produced a periodical in a very small print run. Emerging from the student protests in Wroclaw, the protagonists and their work were influenced by Western stencil street art, punk, and reggae. This catalog provides a comprehensive overview of the journalistic, curatorial, and artistic work of these and other groups.
Price: €35.00