Since 1978 Robakowski has run Exchange Gallery (Galeria Wymiany), a private gallery of recent art featuring leaflets, films, videos, objects, photographs, books, posters, documentations, and all kinds of publications, both the artist's own and donated by other artists. The guiding idea of Exchange Gallery is to 'exchange artistic ideas, cause ferment, and stimulate creative initiatives'. In 1987, Robakowski photographed himself - or, rather, his chest - with objects from the collection, creating the Fetishes series. Exchange Gallery was also responsible for initiating a number of important artistic initiatives - exhibitions, symposiums, publications, particularly in the 1980s.
As part of the Chip-In Culture (Kultura Zrzuty) movement, Robakowski organised the Nieme Kino independent film festivals at the Strych in Łódź (1983-1985), and the Video-Art-Clip International Festival (1987-1989). In 1989, on Robakowski's initiative, a series of everyday events and presentations took place in Łódź, called Dungeons of Manhattan, or New Media Art.
Since the 1970s, an important role has been played in Robakowski's art by his concept of art as a field of energy transmissions. Hence he has focused in many of his works, which are often biological-mechanical recordings, on issues such as vitality or energy resulting from the contact with a tool. The film are often an effect of an encounter between the mechanical camera and the human body, a confrontation between man and medium. "I want to tell you all that art is energy", Robakowski says, jumping out of water in his Energy Manifesto (2003), as if paraphrasing and referring to a conception by Andrzej Pawłowski, who claimed that "art is an energy field". Robakowski wrote in 1977,
For many years I have been studying the relationship between my psychophysical organism and the devices I make mechanical recordings with (film camera, still camera, video camera, tape recorder). These studies have resulted in a sense that technological inventions are of fundamental significance, because they make it possible to convey my psychophysical states, my temperament and consciousness, to tape.
As Piotr Krajewski writes, "The artist is left alone with the camera and through it, connected with space, he follows the nature of the energy emitted by the human being, and at the same time, its traces recorded by the camera". The best example of this may be the film Walking, made during the Workshop of Film Form period (1973), recording the artist's climb up the stairs of a parachute tower. In the single-sequence film, growing increasingly tired, he counts off steps from one to two hundred.
In 1975, Robakowski started a series of works called Energetic Angles, which, as he says,
reflect my fascination with the problem of the existence of 'Angles' as a kind of intuitive geometry. (...) I've been wondering to what extent geometry, whose goals are intended to be purely practical, can function in art. For the problem to gain significance, I've decided to establish the Angles as an energetic culture sign in the form of a personal fetish.
Energy fields have also been realised in Robakowski's art in other ways. In the 1980s, he made films based on recordings of rock concerts, especially his favourite band, the punk group Moskwa. In 1989, in the film My Videomasochisms, he mocked self-mutilating tactics of performance artists: during a for-camera performance, he manipulated various tools next to his face, inflicting a kind of torture on himself. In 1996, in a TV studio, he carried out a happening, broadcast live, during which he was connected to electricity, asking viewers to increase the voltage (I Am Electric). Most recently, in 2008, the artist introduced, as Energy Manifesto, the vastness of the Niagara Falls in the space of Galeria Atlas Sztuki in Łódź. The artist said in an interview given prior to the exhibition's opening,
"This is to be a laboratory-like, artificial situation, but favourable for the person willing to spend time in it. The viewer's contemplative bliss, despite the powerful audiovisual energy, is to be guaranteed by a stylistic figure I call monotony".
In the early 1980s, Robakowski introduced yet another term explaining his practice - 'personal cinema', that is, one based on the observation of one's immediate surroundings as well as 'self-observation'. He wrote in 1981,
"So let's keep filming everything, and it will turn out we're always filming ourselves. Such a filmed and filming individual lives fully only on screen and while his physique is similar to yours, his character and personality are different. It is extremely interesting that you can polemicise with yourself via the screen. So keep filming and keep looking closely and critically with a sense that you on screen are more wonderful than in nature, because you are better able to remember the past. Finally, take into account the fact that your memory often becomes the viewer's memory."
At the time when Robakowski wrote these words, he had already begun shooting footage for From My Window (1978-1999), a collection of camera observations of the courtyard of the artist's tenement in a part of Łódź known as Manhattan, recording the residents and the changes occurring in the space over the years. The film ends with images of the construction of a hotel that is to ultimately obscure the view from Robakowski's window.
The moving video About Fingers (1982) is, in turn, a kind of biography, told for each finger separately (with the characteristic independent narrator from Robakowski's works delivering a background monologue), and at the same time, a 'self-observation document', revealing the private and subjective. Patricia Grzonka notes that, given the piece's historical context and the artist's personal situation at the time - he had just been fired from his teaching position - About Fingers "can also be interpreted as a metaphor of the political situation of the era, a manifesto of the artist's withdrawal at a time of his exclusion from public life".
Of similarly private nature was My Theatre (1985), enacted for the camera by the artist's hands and fingers, again accompanied by an off-screen monologue. During the same time, Robakowski also made films, called 'television re-reports', with clear allusions to the socio-political situation at hand. Brezhnev's Funeral (1982), or Art Is Power! (1984), bringing together footage from a Soviet military parade with music by the Slovenian group Laibach.
In his later films Robakowski often reached for private, intimate stories. In Joseph's Touch (1989), he tells about his three encounters with homosexuality in various stages in his life, with the visual background of images of a gay couple he met in Montreal. In 2004, Robakowski recorded a fictional telephone conversation with his mother, whom he congratulates on her birthday (Conversation With My Mother).
Collector
Józef Robakowski also collects contemporary art. His private collection was presented at one of the exhibitions in the Uśpiony kapitał / Sleeping capital series in the Orangerie of the Wilanów Palace and in Profile Foundation (2013).
The exhibition Sztuka wymiany. Kolekcja Józefa Robakowskiego / Art of exchange. Józef Robakowski's collection included a variety of paintings, sculptures, objects, photographs and videos. A collection of the inter-war period was part of the exhibition, examples of avant-garde traditions that inspired Robakowski in his own artistic practice, and showed his fascination both with logical constructivism and absurd dadaism. Among the artists that took part in the exhibition were: Marina Abramovic i Ulay, Jerzy Bereś, Stanisław Dróżdż, Natalia LL, Jerzy Lewczyński, Sol Le Witt, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Orlan, Nam June Paik, Aleksander Rodczenko, Jadwiga Sawicka, Henryk Stażewski,Zbigniew Warpechowski and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz.
The history of Józef Robakowski's collection started in the 1960s during his museum and archive studies. It grew during the following decades, and contained mostly contemporary art, especially conceptual and film experiments. The multimedia collection is mostly the effect of exchange with other artists, contacts with international milieu of neo-avant-garde creators.
In 1978 Robakowski founded Wymiana Gallery in a private apartement with Małgorzata Potocka, which became one of key places for artistic alternative. This gallery-archive with an art collection, a videoteque, collections of different publications, unique prints and video documentation, for a long time was the only archive of experimental video art in Poland.
To-camera actions and punk music
In 2014 in lokal_30 in Warsaw, a solo exhibition of the artist was organized, entitled Szpula energetyczna / Energetic spool, during which Robakowski presented unseen before to-camera actions and materials created thanks to the artist's friendship with punk rockers from Łódź. These are clips created for the legendary band Moskwa in the 1980s, a concert Kapela MOSKWA i moje oko... registered in 1985 in Cytryna cinema in Łódź and photos Robakowski took during his meetings with Gumola (the band's leader) and his friends.
One-shot films, so characteristic of Józef Robakowski, appeared for the first time in the 1980s. These are to-camera performances with no editing, which last as long as the projection. The artist registers his activity, limited by a motionless frame, performing in front of a static, objective camera.
Everything that happens, is invented by Robakowski, who uses the frame as the space of his artistic expression, but also of freedom, like in the film Mój teatr / My theatre (1985), in which he says: 'As soon as I leave my theatre and go on the street, they make me do: attention-at ease, attention-at ease, attention-at ease'. The tight frame is also the place of an intimate narrative (Okulary / Glasses, 1992) or Robakowski's confessions to his confidante – a camera. This is what happens in the film Piegi (Freckles) (2014). he confesses:
It's 1949, I live in a small town Tuchola. I have a serious problem. My classmates laugh at me because of my freckles. Many freckels. Freckled Józio.
Robakowski adds that these recordings often show his current state of mind, like for example Dwie pieśni nastrojów (Two mood songs) (1990) or the newest recording of the artist's radical poem Mordę skuję / Chain your face (2015). Most of these short movies, despite of their personal character, is touched by a sense of humour typical for Robakowski and a dadaist self-mocking. Taniec z Lajkonikiem (A dance with Lajkonik) (1992) with Marek Chłoniewski and Krzysztof Knittel's score, is the recording of Lajkonik dancing with a bottle of vodka.