This work, consisting of a single sentence: 'I've Never Made a Work about the Holocaust', was created for the Próżna project, held annually since 2005 in the buildings of Próżna Street as part of the Singer’s Warsaw Festival of Jewish Culture.
This sentence/declaration was written by Oskar Dawicki with a pencil on a sheet of A4 paper and put on display. The unusual idea of the artist is based on paradox – Dawicki declares that he has never made any works about the Holocaust, and at the same time, by including the text in the exhibition, he made one. His creation provided inspiration for the panel discussion, which happened in the same year in Zachęta with the participation of Grzegorz Gauden, Sylwia Chutnik, Roman Kurkiewicz and Ewa Mikina. Dawicki’s work is currently located in the Gallery of 20th and 21st-century Art in the National Museum in Warsaw.
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I've Never Made a Work about the Holocaust can be understood not only as a piece on the Holocaust, but also as an important declaration regarding the instrumentalisation and trivialisation of tragic topics by some artists.
Dawicki mentions in one of his interviews that the inspiration for I've Never Made Work about Holocaust came from a conversation with Zbigniew Libera on shallow and embarrassingly bad ‘Holocaust art’. He was encouraged to take up this topic by the exhibition of a Polish artist known under the pseudonym Peter Fuss, which took place in the spring of 2009 in Prague and showed edited photographs of German soldiers with the Star of David on their sleeves. Dawicki is against conjectural art, which in a way feeds on ‘big topics’. The artist criticised this phenomenon in his characteristic pastiche style.
I believe that the artist does not have any obligations and does not have to take up any topic, if he or she does not want to.
– says Dawicki, who is a supporter of the autonomy of art and his works do not deal with socially and politically charged topics.
Author: Ewa Gorządek, March 2015, ed. TS, transl. Bozhana Nikolova, March 2015
