‘Science & Art in the Process of Protecting the Natural Human Environment’: About the Zgorzelec Region Plein-Air
The subject of humans’ relationship with the natural environment and the demands for its protection began to appear in the activities of individual artists in Poland as early as the first half of the 1960s. Yet it appears that July 1971 and the Zgorzelec region plein-air (Plener Ziemia Zgorzelecka) have for long nearly fallen into oblivion.
At a time when in the so-called 'Regained Territories' at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, successive artistic plein-airs flourished, coal mining in Poland reached a record scale of 200 million tons per year, new mines were built and intensive investments were made in the development of heavy industry. This parallelism is not entirely accidental. While the party authorities willingly contributed to the development of industry, the development of art had a clearly lower priority. The plein-airs themselves were treated as a kind of working alternative to large public institutions – although in many cities in the People's Republic of Poland galleries belonging to the network of Art Exhibitions Offices (BWAs) with their headquarters in Warsaw's Zachęta Gallery were established, there were no modern centres of contemporary art yet. The cyclical meetings in several cities in the west of the country started to forge new forms and ideas.
In the context of plein-airs, contemporary art may not have played a parasitic role per se, but it remained largely dependent on industry – to stick to biological metaphors, this relationship could be described as commensalism. In this case, the art world benefited, while the industry was largely indifferent. The development of industrial plants was not dependent on artists in any way, factories gained an opportunity to easily get rid of production waste, while artists – to obtain means and materials for the production of works. In the case of the Biennale of Spatial Forms (Biennale Form Przestrzennych) in Elbląg, the 'social patron' of art became, for example, the Zamech plant, a producer of ship parts. The party authorities, in turn, found these events useful primarily as an element of legitimizing the official cultural policy in the territories annexed to Poland after World War II.
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Włodzimierz Borowski during preparations for the 4th Syncretic Show (Pokaz Synkretyczny), Puławy 1966, photo: © Anka Ptaszkowska, Paulina Krasińska. The negatives are the property of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
Over time, however, this relationship began to be problematic for some artists. The ecological discourse was developing and it was increasingly difficult to consider the use of industrial resources as completely ethically neutral. Instead of taking advantage of the facilitations offered by entering into cooperation with the industry, celebrating the rapprochement between artists and workers, and turning a blind eye to the negative effects of the operation of factories, since the Zgorzelec region plein-air, artists have increasingly begun to look at the impact of heavy industry on the environment.
The plein-air organized in July 1971 became a moment of a clear course-correction, which was already expressed in its motto – 'Science and art in the process of protecting the natural human environment'. Its initiators were the critic and theoretician Jerzy Ludwiński, today considered a key author in the history of Polish conceptual art, and the artists Jan Chwałczyk and Antoni Dzieduszycki, both associated with the Wrocław neo-avant-garde. The plein-air took place in the title region, specifically in the town of Opolno-Zdrój, formerly the Prussian health resort of Bad Oppelsdorf, and in the Turów lignite mine, in the far southwestern borderland between People's Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. The at-the-time character of the area was created by the intensive post-war exploitation of lignite deposits, as a result of which the green spa landscape turned almost into a wasteland. As the organizers wrote:
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Nature in a state close to the original meets here with the new nature created as a result of industrial and technical human activity. Here, too, the effects of the destructive action of humankind, who, using the riches of the earth's nature, completely destroyed the original character of the landscape, are particularly vivid.
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Konrad Jarodzki, ‘A Record of Space’, photographic documentation of the Zgorzelec Land Plein-Air 1971, photo: Natalia LL, collection of the Wrocław Contemporary Museum, MWW
The actions implemented were based on exceptionally economical gestures, emphasizing, through stark contrast, the scale of the mine, and thus – of the human interference in the landscape. The production of permanent material artifacts was avoided programmatically. Participants of the plein-air largely used the language of conceptual art, not as part of considerations of purely artistic ideas or abstract concepts, but as a criticism of exploitation and littering of the environment by humans. The organizers of the open-air wrote straightforwardly: 'The world is littered with the civilization of objects – human-made products. The overproduction of objects is caused, among others, by the stereotype of thinking resulting from the desire to possess.' Unlike earlier plein-airs in Osieki or Elbląg, the traces of the Zgorzelec region plein-air are modest, basically limited to photographic and textual documentation.
Konrad Jarodzki, as part of the 'Recording Space (Zapis Przestrzeni)' campaign, stretched a white rope in the area of the open-pit mine. In actions close to the traditions of land art, it was not this particular string that constituted the actual work, but the entire open-pit mine, where a thin white line crossing the mining craters only emphasized the extensive scale of human interference in nature. Andrzej Matuszewski, in his work 'Documentation of the Place (Dokumentacja Miejsca)', put handfuls of soil with fragments of rocks from the mine into a frame and glass. This action is also close to land art in the spirit of Robert Smithson's non-sites, but in this case the aim was not to transfer the material to the gallery. The work was presented right next to the mine itself, and the fragment of the earth was not so much isolated and placed in a different context, but selected as a sample for laboratory examination. Whereas Jarodzki used the macro scale, Matuszewski went in the opposite direction, drawing attention to the fact that the history of human activity is also recorded in the geological layers of the earth.
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Antoni Dzieduszycki, 'I' (ja), photographic documentation of the Zgorzelec Land Plein-Air 1971, photo: Natalia LL, collection of the Wrocław Contemporary Museum, MWW
Large-scale documentation of landscape changes, in a methodical but also random way, was conducted by Natalia LL, who circled around the area taking pictures of the local landscape every 250 meters from the car window. In a direct and somewhat paradoxical way, Wanda Gołkowska referred to the issue of overproduction in her 'Disapprover (Dezaprobator)' – an object with a tape wound on a reel with the text 'OVERPRODUCTION OF WORKS OF ART AND OVERINFORMATION make it difficult to choose'.
It is not without reason that in the title of the plein-air workshop in Opolno-Zdrój – and then several plein-air workshops in Osieki and Zielona Góra, following the trail blazed at the time – there was also science next to art. An important part of the plein-airs at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s were symposia with the participation of artists and scientists, supplementing the discussion on environmental changes with a specialists’ perspective. Importantly, the 1971 symposium was also attended by representatives of the local community – residents of Opolno-Zdrój, as well as the management of the mine and the miners working there. Representatives of the local industry did not stand in opposition to other participants of the symposium, who drew attention to the scale of environmental damage and sought opportunities to change course. The title of the paper delivered by Eugeniusz Mróz, the director of the Turów power plant, is meaningful – 'Protection of the natural environment within industrial plants, including recreational areas'.
From a global perspective, the Zgorzelec region plein-air was rather in sync with the spirit of the times than constituted a revolution, but the atmosphere behind the Iron Curtain was completely different than in the West. A year after the plein-air, the members of the UN held a conference in Stockholm under the eloquent title 'We only have one Earth' to tackle the issues of environmental protection and climate change. With a, from today's perspective, chilling precision they were predicted by the Club of Rome’s report 'The Limits to Growth' published in the same year. The Soviet Union did not take part in the conference at all, and since the time of Stalinism, its attitude towards the environment has remained extremely utilitarian, based on the exploitation of all possible resources.
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Turów lignite open pit mine, photographic documentation of the Zgorzelec Region 1971, photo: Natalia LL, collection of the Wrocław Contemporary Museum, MWW
However, also in the USSR’s sphere of influence, a discussion on the need to change the approach to the natural environment developed, although for obvious reasons, publications appearing in the Soviet bloc reached for arguments different from those of the Western authors. Different meaning: drawing from Marxist thought, and in the case of the People's Republic of Poland also on the local literary tradition, ranging from Adam Mickiewicz to Czesław Miłosz. The ecological movement in Poland criticized the policy of accelerated industrialization, but while in the Western countries this criticism also included excessive consumerism, in the realities of the People's Republic of Poland it was rather demanded that the course of heavy industry be changed to light, so that a sufficient amount of consumer goods would be available at all.
Although the Zgorzelec region plein-air took place only once and in the history of art for many years remained in the shadow of events held regularly for several years or even decades, such as the Złote Grono in Zielona Góra or the Biennale of Spatial Forms in Elbląg, it left an indelible mark on further development of ecologically-involved art. One could even say that it became for it what the one-off and extremely influential Wrocław 1970 plein-air was for conceptual art. Suffice it to say that in 1972 the plein-air in Osiek was held under the identical title 'Art and science in the process of protecting the sphere of vision (Sztuka i nauka w procesie ochrony strefy widzenia)'.
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'The Zgorzelec region: Opolno 2071', artistic plein-air, 2021, photo: Alicja Kochanowicz
Years later, the plein-air in Turów regained its rightful place in the history of art. Sylwia Serafinowicz was one of the first to notice its groundbreaking role in the development of ecologically engaged art in Poland as part of the 'Earth' exhibition she curated at the Wrocław Contemporary Museum in 2015. In the years that followed, documentation of the plein-air action appeared in subsequent exhibitions devoted to historic relations between art and environmental protection, until finally, on the fiftieth anniversary of the event, it was commemorated in the form of an extensive, several-month-long jubilee program in Wrocław and updated on the spot, as part of the plein-air 'Zorzelec Region plein-air: Opolno 2071 (Ziemia Zgorzelecka: Opolno 2071)', organized in Opolno-Zdrój by a new generation artists, researchers and representatives of local communities, this time looking for positive visions for the next half-century, in the perspective of the region itself and the relationship between humans and the natural environment as such.
Translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar
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