Anastazy B. Wiśniewski

Conceptual artist, theoretician and organiser of cultural life and precursor of Polish mail art. He was born on 21st May 1943 in Bydgoszcz and died in 2011 in Złotowo.

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Anastazy B. Wiśniewski, Płytnica, 1978, photo: Wojciech Beszterda

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The artist’s real name was Bogdan Wiśniewski, and he adopted the pseudonym ‘Anastazy’ during his studies at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław, from which he graduated in 1968. Soon afterwards, he began to participate in artistic life, but from the very beginning he positioned himself on its margins, in the position of a commentator and dissenter. Wiśniewski took part in symposia and referred to the current artistic life through prints sent out regularly by post. Bożena Kowalska even wrote that ‘he was the first and only authentic creator of mail art in Poland’. Authenticity in this case can be understood as the consistency and breadth of Wiśniewski’s mail-art practice, which was not limited to occasional activities but consisted of sending texts, reports and commentaries regularly to other artists from the end of the 1960s, printed in a handwritten typeface.

Wojciech Beszterda, Leopold Duszka-Kołcz and Witold Kanicki, curators of the exhibition Przystanek na Żądanie (A Stop on Demand) at the BWAiUP gallery in Piła, wrote: ‘His extremely consistent critical stance influenced the resentment of the authorities, critics and other artists, pushing his artistic output to the margins of the art world of the time.’ In his critical view of the social realities of the later years of the communist regime in Poland, Wiśniewski remained a distanced commentator, not dreaming of the possibility of social change through art. As he wrote himself: ‘I refer to the established structures with the indulgent smile of a victor. Structures destroy themselves, they should not be disturbed in their joyful development’. Wojciech Beszterda pointed to the Dadaist origins of Wiśniewski’s attitude, while Witold Kanicki suggested that the political climate of the late 1960s, a time of strikes, student revolts and a revolution in customs, a temporary carnivalisation of the regime, remained crucial to its formation.

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Anastazy Wiśniewski, model and plan for the ‘Art Centre’ project (pillory). Wrocław ’70 Art Symposium, Wrocław, 1970, photo: Tadeusz Rolke/AW

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For an erudite artist who was not averse to theorising, philosophical references also remained important. Amongst others, Wiśniewski referred to Hegelian dialectics, the theories of Hans-Georg Gadamer or Jean-François Lyotard, treating his actions as a kind of mischievous, performative philosophical parable. Despite his extensive oeuvre, Wiśniewski is marginally represented in the collections of the most important domestic institutions; until the aforementioned exhibition in Piła in 2015, he had also not received any fully-fledged monograph, and his oeuvre is still awaiting a meticulous book-length discussion. This absence is partly related to the ephemeral nature of Wiśniewski’s practice, but difficulties are also posed by its nature, balancing on the border between art, criticism and theory, and the reactivity of the artist’s activities. As a broader context is indispensable for their understanding, a story about Wiśniewski’s art is always necessarily a story about the events, conventions and artistic currents to which he referred. As Kanicki wrote: ‘his incessant retorts and artistic commentaries situate Wiśniewski in the space of a continuous game in which he assumes the persona of a ‘chess-playing jester’, most often responding with his works to the ‘moves’ of various figures from the Polish art world’. Wiśniewski himself wrote: ‘Both the theory of positive negation and my artistic practice arose in a clash [...] with the nonsense of reality. The positive character of my theory [...] stemmed from a search for meaning.’

For example, in the action Dream (Sen) from 1969, he responded directly to the action My Nie Śpimy (We Are Not Asleep) by Mieczysław Dymny, Stanisław Szczepański and Tomasz Wawak at the Złote Grono symposium in Zielona Góra, which took place the same year. His Teoria do Widzenia (Theory of Goodbye), on the other hand, is a kind of parody of Władysław Strzemiński’s Teoria Widzenia (Theory of Seeing), in which instead of a coherent historical vision he included a chaotic collection of press cuttings and photographs from catalogues. By mail, he announced the establishment of the oppositional ‘Independent Non-Existent NIE Gallery’ and the ‘Non-Existent TAK Gallery’, ‘nodding agreement to all artistic endeavours’.

Wiśniewski’s artistic strategy is perfectly illustrated by his proposals prepared as part of the Wrocław ‘70 Symposium. It was on this occasion that he designed a three-metre high phallic obelisk entitled Pręgierz (Whipping Post), which was ultimately to be made of pink marble. The context of the event, whose political rationale was to celebrate Wrocław’s return to the ‘motherland’ and mark it with the presence of contemporary Polish culture through the realisation of permanent projects in the public space (although in the end the vast majority of the projects only gained a conceptual character), is important in this case. Pręgierz can thus be read, on the one hand, in the context of public art and monumental sculpture, dominated by figures of men with guns and quasi-phallic obelisks, as well as the cultural marking of the Recovered Territories as part of repolonisation – a strategy of, to put it brutally, a political ‘pissing contest’ – while at the same time nurturing martyrology and resentment – not without reason, after all, the sculpture was intended to refer to a whipping post. During the Symposium, Wiśniewski also entered into a dialogue with other artists, handing out actions for the other artists to perform as part of the Down with Plagiarism action. The content of these commissions is a kind of commentary on the conventions of emerging conceptual art, the social significance of artistic projects in public space or the environmental hierarchies of the time: ‘commission for Marczyński: design of a trapdoor; commission for Kantor (always first): come after Marczyński’s commission and persuade the people of Wrocław to do it’.

At the Ziemia Zgorzelecka open-air workshop in 1971, at which the foundations of ecologically engaged Polish art were being laid, instead of giving a standard lecture Wiśniewski merely sat, silent and crying for half an hour. Silence grew in his practice into an artistic strategy, which he used as a kind of commentary in various circumstances. As Beszterda wrote at a symposium in Osieki in 1973: ‘during the lecture, he remained silent and illustrated his silence with photographs, in which he depicted various forms of pouring water “from empty into empty”. He showed water pouring out of a bucket, leaking taps, showers’. This was in reference to a Polish saying that indicates an exercise in futility. Henryk Waniek, in turn, recalled: ‘In a scholarly discussion on artistic media, after Stefan Morawski’s paper, Wiśniewski was silent for a full five minutes, demanding that his silence be treated as a voice in the discussion’.

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Bogdan Anastazy Wiśniewski, 'And he pretends to be a bird', photo: Bartosz Górka/Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

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Wiśniewski was particularly sensitive to all pathos, megalomania and pretentiousness. The Koncert na 10 000 Ptaszków (Concert for 10,000 Little Birds) can be seen as a response to activities such as Kantor’s Panoramic Sea Happening, but also large state ceremonies, marches and parades. In turn, a comment on the practice of appropriating elements of reality as one’s own works was the distribution of a physical map of the world – the entire Earth was signed by the creator as ‘Objet d'art by Anastazy Wiśniewski’. Wojciech Beszterda pointed out that the action was a direct response to Robert Smithson’s declaration of the Yucatan peninsula as a work of art. The very use of the French language in Wiśniewski’s mail-art works can probably be interpreted as a kind of minor nudge towards the Foksal Gallery milieu.

In his performative actions, especially his printed and mailed works, he also referred to the political situation of the time, the party and media language and visual culture, stylising his works into prints of official communiqués, reports, police reports or notes from the pen of a secret police collaborator. In one print, for example, he wrote: ’I authorise Citizen Gerard Kwiatkowski, ID No. ... residing in ... and Citizen Andrzej Matuszewski [...] to interrogate me in order to establish something’. As part of the Rozmowy Indywidualne (Individual Interviews) action at the ZSP Gallery at the University of Warsaw in 1972, he sat behind a red cloth-covered table, in a room decorated with red flags, and waited for visitors. As soon as another person crossed the threshold and sat down to talk to the artist, the exchange of words was drowned out by the sound of The Internationale, played at full volume. ‘How hostile the reality of the time was to such an eruption of ideas and creative imagination is evidenced by the order to liquidate the [TAK] Gallery, which did not exist materially’ – wrote Wiśniewski. Indeed, after participating in the 1st May march with a banner bearing the name of the TAK Gallery (with which he marched in the opposite direction to the march), he was officially ordered to close the gallery down.

In 1977, he settled in the small town of Płytnica near Piła. The biggest influence on this move was, as Beszterda recalled, the artist’s love of fishing. It was there that he created, among other things, Ćwiczenia w Pejzażu (Exercises in Landscape) and Pejzaże Obojętne w Oleju (Inert Landscapes in Oil) – actions documented in photographs by Beszterda, in which the artist covered a real landscape with an empty frame. At the time, Wiśniewski also practised and theorised the ‘tapeart’ trend. The paintings, composed of red vertical and horizontal lines on a white background, forming an irregular grid, were meant to be a materialisation of the ‘concept after art and after painting’, which ‘consists in calming the viewer and the intellect’ and ‘is directed against future art’. In the early 1980s, during the heyday of the new form of art expression, Wiśniewski was critical of its eruption: ‘the emergence of wild painting, which is characterised in the sphere of thought by a radical anti-avant-garde attitude’ he perceived as ‘suspicious and disturbing’, as a ‘manipulation of the “market” in the art market’.

The grid paintings, which looked like variations on the art of Daniel Buren or Agnes Martin, were meant to offer, with their harmonious balance, reassurance in a flood of ‘wild’ painting. In doing so, Wiśniewski also referred to the theses of Lyotard, who writes that the aesthetic category of the sublime and the emotional response to it are linked to the emergence of social and political totalitarianisms. Tapeart was therefore to be programmatically devoid of emotion, much like the slightly earlier Inert Landscapes in Oil. At the same time, by pointing out the tape nature of the objects produced, the artist seemed to be going a step further, sensing what was to come at the end of the decade – the ‘Neo-Geo’ painting trend, which ostensibly took a critical approach while formally recycling the language of the modernist avant-garde at the beginning of the century. It was perfectly tailored to the swollen art market, like its later follower, ‘zombie formalism’.

Although most of his oeuvre is associated with the language and political realities of the later period of the communist regime, Wiśniewski did not lose his vigilance for changes in visual culture and social mood in the following decades. In 1990, his exhibition at the Sculpture Gallery in Warsaw enticed passers-by with an inscription painted on the glass window in large white letters: ‘Anastazy B. Wiśniewski, Naked Chicks’. It had nothing to do with the content of the exhibition, but seemed to respond to the transformative flood of objects and images to consume, including cheap erotica and pornography. Thus, even in the Third Polish Republic, Wiśniewski was able to play ironically with current codes of communication.

Wiśniewski also remained active as an organiser of artistic events, such as Zjazd Marzycieli (Dreamers’ Reunion) as part of the 4th Biennial of Spatial Forms in Elbląg in 1971, and in the 1980s, the open-air meeting Performance czy Przedstawienie at Lake Płotki near Piła and the symposium Art of Time, Space and Imagination in Piła. In the 1980s, he also worked at the Provincial Cultural Centre and organised galleries in small towns in the then Piła Province.

Bożena Kowalska stated that Wiśniewski ‘did not find any successors’, which, however, does not seem to be entirely true. Already at the beginning of the 1980s, oppositional strategies similar to Wiśniewski’s were used by slightly younger artists associated with Kultura Zrzuty group, who also referred primarily to the convention of conceptual art, although they debuted at the time of its decline, while Wiśniewski was its co-creator and commentator at the very beginning. Also after 1989 we can find echoes of Wiśniewski’s attitude in the performative practice of Cezary Bodzianowski or a few years of activity of the Polen Performance duo, while Zbigniew Libera directly referred to him in his Masters series.