And, while Duchamp himself explains that he sought out objects that he felt indifferent, Kantor was rather constantly drawn to the debased object. According to him, the Reality of a Lower Order,
"continuously demands that I examine and express issues through base materials, the basest possible, materials that are poor, deprived of dignity and prestige, defenseless and often downright contemptible."
Duchamp’s indifference, neutrality are not quite the same as contempt.
Towards Art and… Away
Every stage in Kantor’s work in the theater corresponds to a development in his work as a visual artist. His vision in both areas underwent major transformation in the 1950 and 1960s. It was then that he turned entirely turned away from abstract art and illusionist painting, focusing on a conceptual aesthetic oriented toward physical objects - umbrellas, bags, crumpled rags and pieces of paper, common garbage - transposed from everyday life to the world of art.
With his constant fascination with the Aristotelian echoes of the "nothingness” of primal matter, it is not surprising that Kantor's insistence on the In-formel is essentially linked with his reflections on the "end of art".
As revolutionary as he was, Duchamp produced relatively few artworks, while remaining mostly aloof of the avant-garde circles of his time. He went on to pretend to abandon art and devote the rest of his life to chess, while secretly continuing to make art.
While Duchamp’s contemporaries and colleagues were achieving spectacular success by selling their works to collectors, Duchamp observed,
"I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."
Here, it is worth to evoke two factors. Kantor lived and worked in a Communist Poland, within a totalitarian system of socialism. Within this political frame, there was no room for the art market as it was beginning to exist in Duchamp’s time and milieu – notably in the United States. This is one historical and contextual reason for a different stance towards the art in its institutionalized context. There is, one happening that nonetheless reveals a tongue-in-cheek position of Kantor with respect to the commercial dimension of art. His 1970 Multi-part toyed with the idea of reproduction of art, it commercial value, as well as notion of a spectator’s participation in the creative work – an idea which Kantor found had become conventionalized. Guests of the happening were invited to buy nearly identical canvases with umbrellas attached to them, objects into which they were invited to intervene on condition of allowing their later display.
Duchamp also elaborated on his choice of chess over art in the following words:
"The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. ... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."
Duchamp, Kantor, and the Subversion of Performative Art
The theme of the "endgame" taken from chess is a point of reference for Duchamp's complex attitude towards his artistic career. In 1968, Duchamp played an artistically important chess match with avant-garde composer John Cage, at a concert entitled Reunion. Music was produced by a series of photoelectric cells underneath the chessboard, triggered sporadically by normal game play.
This engagement makes for a meeting point between the highest form of conceptual art, a game, and a performance. As much as he disliked art’s merely ‘retinal’ forms, Duchamp started his career in the visual arts, to finish entirely devoted to chess. He even left a legacy to chess in the form of an enigmatic endgame problem he composed in 1943. It remains an unsolved one for chess masterminds to date.
Kantor, on the other hand, insisted,
"When somebody says that I am a theater director, I don't agree. When he calls me a painter, however, I agree, because it's an old term with an enormous tradition behind it - but 'director'? Only about two hundred years…”.
Painting was for Kantor an actual laboratory of ideas, a private scene of dialogue with tradition, the avant-garde, and the whole world. Yet, it was always through a confrontation with the performative that he managed to push the limits of art in both the genres he engaged with.
In a light-spirited, revolutionary and very much dadaist spirit, he authored the first happening art piece in Poland. The Panoramic Sea-happening took place on August 23, 1967 in Łazy, a small town near Osiek. It was the most spectacular and complex of all of Kantor's happenings. Organized for only a couple of participants (mostly for members and friends of the Foksal Gallery), it had an enormous audience among tourists relaxing on the beach. The happening consisted of four parts, and the first Sea Concert had an audience seated on deckchairs by shore, while a man dressed in a tuxedo was conducting the waves while standing on a platform submerged in the water.
And one cannot help but wonder what the encounter of a theatre legend-conductor of sea-waves and the dadaist chess champion would have looked like.
Authored by Paulina Schlosser, March 2015
Sources: Tadeusz Kantor, the book by Jan Kłossowicz, Tadeusz Kantor