Procedures of 1970s Art

Procedures of 1970s Art is an exhibition presenting early performative practices in Polish art in the 1970s and late 1960s.

Featuring photographic and film documentation as well as archival descriptions and commentaries, the show offers an insight into the practices of radical artists situated outside the institutional art world, today recognised as classics of avant-garde art. The documentation gathered for the exhibition presents performative practices that allowed those artists to go beyond the canonical narratives of modernism and open art up to social and political contexts.  The show’s title is a reference to Andrzej Dłużniewski’s 1979 action,Procedure, where for four days, in front of the public, he realised a stereotypical scenario of painterly procedure, thus commenting ironically on the modernist attachment to the concept of the artwork as the main criterion of art. Ten years earlier, in The Proceeding, a large-scale happening by Andrzej Matuszewski, the author remained invisible for the viewers, who became the actual participants of the orchestrated events.