COURAGE

povezovanje zbirk

Securitatea was a quarterly aimed at improving the training of Securitate operative personnel. Its articles were written by Securitate officers for Securitate officers and thus they touched upon practical problems faced during their specific mission of preventing and neutralising any actions that potentially threatened the communist regime. Among the many dangers that were outlined in the pages of the quarterly as undermining “state security” were foreign radio stations, and especially Radio Free Europe (RFE). The article chosen as a featured item of the collection presents under the title “Cu referire la relațiile cetățenilor români cu unele posturi de radio capitaliste” (About the relations of Romanian citizens with some capitalist radio stations) the perspective of the Securitate upon the activity of RFE and evaluates its contribution in providing an alternative source of information for Romanians. In the absence of underground publications, RFE represented the main source of alternative information in communist Romania. Thus, the Securitate regarded RFE and contacts between Romanian citizens and employees of the Romanian desk of this radio station as dangerous to the communist regime. Accordingly, the entire article focuses on revealing how RFE allegedly acts in order to undermine “state security.” Starting from the premise that RFE is the locus “of espionage, ideological diversion, and hostile propaganda,” the anonymous author traces the connection between this radio station and the American espionage machine, namely the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency was credited with financing RFE and setting its agenda even after the American Congress officially took responsibility for financially supporting its functioning. The control of the CIA over RFE was underlined once again when discussing its organisation. The two management structures in the United States and Europe were allegedly infiltrated by CIA agents who engaged the radio station in their “ungentlemanly” war against communist countries and used it to collect information about them. As a result, the CIA used the microphone of RFE to proffer slanders and shamefully distort the realities of the communist countries, according to the Securitate’s interpretation of the broadcasting of news and other political programmes by this radio station. Even worse from the point of view of the Securitate was that people travelling abroad were an easy prey for “agents” working at the Romanian desk of RFE. After underlining the connection between its director, deputy director, and programme producers with the CIA, the article describes how they allegedly succeeded in manipulating Romanian tourists in order to collect valuable information about the country, its leadership, and the impact of its social and economic policies on the mood of the population. In other cases, they even managed to trick their “victims” and persuade them to emigrate. The narrative of blaming RFE for these “unpatriotic” deeds was an ideologically convenient explanation for the fact that the great majority of Romanians listened to and trusted RFE, in spite of the fact that this might have caused problems. At the same time, such a narrative was meant to highlight the vital role played by the Securitate as a guardian of the communist regime in Romania.

 

Action Tableau of shaking hands during the Meeting of Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian artists, August 26–27, 1972, organized by László Beke

As the organizer of the event Meeting of Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian artists, László Beke intended to reflect on the possibilities of cooperation between artists from the three (at that time two) countries in the past and present, while examining and reconsidering the problems around the case of 1968, when Hungarian troops invaded Czechoslovakia in alliance with the Soviet Union. In addition to the handshakes of artists from different countries, which resulted in the tableau work documenting the meeting, the event included a tug of war action, which recalled the memories of 1968 by tearing up a photo showing the united forces playing tug of war after marching in the former Czechoslovakia in 1968; and an exhibition including a list of words which are similar in all three languages (Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian). Participants: Imre Bak, Peter Bartos, László Beke, Miklós Erdély, Stano Filko, György Galántai, Péter Halász, Béla Hap, Ágnes Háy, Tamás Hencze, György Jovánovics, J. H. Kocman, Péter Legéndy, János Major, László Méhes, Gyula Pauer, Vladjimir Popovic, Petr Stembera, Rudolf Sikora, Tamás Szentjóby, Anna Szeredi, Endre Tót, Péter Türk, Jiri Valoch.

The series of performances by the KwieKulik duo titled “Activities on the Head” was conducted during the “Body Performance” festival at the Labirynt gallery in Lublin in 1978.
As a part of one of the actions, famous for the iconic photo, Przemysław Kwiek washed his face and feet in a bowl in which there was the head of his artistic and life partner, Zofia Kulik, placed there via hole cut in it.
This was not the first time KwieKulik used their own or models’ faces and heads in their actions. In 1971, together with their artist friends they carried out the Game on an Actress’s Face. It was a camera-recorded process visual game. The actress was Ewa Lemańska, widely known to the general public from her role in the highly popular JanosikTV series. The artists, outside the frame made subsequent moves on the face of the actress using visual gestures. Each gesture had to refer to the previous one and be open to the next step. They painted her, put scotch tape and glued crepe paper and colourful sticks, or made small modelling clay sculptures. One of the participants placed a piece of glass between the actress’s teeth and put a lighted cigarette on it. 
The full description of the series of the 1978 performances is available in the 2012 monumental book summarising the activities of KwieKulik:

“In the first part, before entering the hall, the audience was asked to stick small red pennants behind their ears. [...] As they were entering, they saw Kwiek and Kulik with their heads stuck in the seats of two chairs. 
In the second part, Kulik sat on the floor with her head sticking out of the bottom of a bowl. After pouring water into the bowl, Kwiek washed his face, took off his shirt, washed his armpits, and finally took off his shoes and socks, and washed his feet. After that, Kwiek poured more water, so that it covered Kulik’s mouth but not her nose, so she could breathe but could not speak. He then put a sharp tip of a knife against the back of her head and started to shout: “Say something, you whore, come on... you can’t, can you?!” In the third part the audience saw Kwiek and Kulik sitting on the chairs with bins on their heads (there were openings for their heads in the bottoms of the bins). As it was previously arranged, two artists (Janusz Bałdyga na Łukasz Szajna) proceeded to circle around the artists, tossing rubbish into the bins, which they had earlier taken out of a container in the corridor of the gallery.”

The title of this performance was used as the title of a collective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2015, which present new phenomena in Polish art. The title was used as a general metaphor of “«procedures» for the viewer's head, but also works that use the mind as a tool to «calibrate» what is both visible and invisible around us.”
The still frame with Kwiek washing his face above the bowl with the head of Kulik was also used for the cover of the monograph summarising the activities of the duo.

Źródła: 
KwieKulik. Zofia Kulik & Przemysław Kwiek, eds. Łukasz Ronduda, Georg Schöllhammer, Warsaw/Wrocław/Vienna 2012.

As soon as their son was born, Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek started “using” him in their artistic experiments.
There are over 900 photographs from the years 1972-1974 where the newborn is composed into spatial-visual settings with everyday objects, most often in the private apartment of the artists. 
On one occasion he is placed in a baking pan circled with a cutlery ornament. Another time he is sitting in a metal bucket in a sink or is looking with keen interest out of the toilet bowl. The artists arrange around their son circles and patterns made of onion, lumps of ice, or the books they are reading at moment (Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations). 
These arrangements often feature the symbol of the communist state, i.e. the red banner. But the images also reveal the material misery of the décor and furnishings, the poverty of the Polish People's Republic, magnified by the material paucity of the hackworking artists.
By writing about the “use of their child in art”, Kwiek and Kulik signalled that they were aware that employing their child as a prop or a component of a work of art was controversial. As one of the contemporary commentators noted, their actions were “equally methodical and instrumental.”
The set-ups of the photographs are by no means incidental. Inspired by academic lectures, the artists wanted to translate the “mathematical and logical operations” to visual actions, and discover methods of doing analogous actions in their own field.
Revealing the poverty of their daily life was also interpreted as related to “the ideological dilemmas o Kwiek and Kulik, whose leftist ideas were too radical for the conformist party apparatus.” The entire project was seen as an attempt to “translate the experience of being a parent, being bound by the bureaucracy, and being an artist at the mercy of «people's» government into the language of art.” (Adam Mazur).

Źródła: 
KwieKulik. Zofia Kulik & Przemysław Kwiek, eds. Łukasz Ronduda, Georg Schöllhammer, Warsaw/Wrocław/Vienna 2012.
Mazur Adam, Kwiekulik, „Działania z Dobromierzem” 1972-1974, Culture.pl, 2015, http://culture.pl/pl/dzielo/kwiekulik-dzialania-z-dobromierzem-1972-1974

The work of Adriena Šimotová that is in Jindřich Štreita’s collection is one of the many large-scale paper works that the artist has created since the 1970s. This is a body print imprinted in several layers of paper, highlighted with a blue pigment. Like the Polish sculptor Magdalen Abakanowicz, Simot formed her own body with touch. In many of her works she has attempted to wipe out the difference between the creator and his work. She wanted a physical gesture, such as a print of the body, the face or the limbs, to literally be incorporated into the work. Therefore, the traditional canvas was replaced with fine laminated paper or linen sheets. The paper, which symbolized vulnerable and sensitive skin, layered, crackled and jerked directly on her body or the bodies of her friends. Printed bodies and their torso became the symbol of a man wounded during the ‘normalization’ period of the 1970s and 1980s.

According to Jindřich Štreit, this work of Adriena Šimotová is the most valuable work in his collection; the estimated price is more than half a million euro.