Individual Conversations – Non-Existent Nodding Gallery “Yes” Reference Image

Individual Conversations, an action by Leszek Przyjemski and Anastazy Wiśniewski took place in 1972 as part of the Non-existent Nodding Gallery “Yes” (1970–1974) programme. For its temporary premises, the artists chose Paweł Freisler’s Repassage Gallery in Warsaw which presented counter-culture activities of the neo-avant-garde of the 1970s. It gathered alumni and professors of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, which Przyjemski and Wiśniewski referred to with their poster placed on the door: “Gallery/ – YES – /Krakowskie Przedmieście 24/ Individual Conversations/ Professors 10-12/ Students 18-20/ 12-04-72”. The Gallery “Yes” stemmed from the traditions of conceptual art offering a juxtaposition to the programme of the Defying Gallery “No” (1970) founded by Anastazy Wiśniewski. It also gave rise to fictitious anti-institutions of art that Przyjemski later founded to defy the artistic mainstream of socialist Poland. The programme of the gallery was implemented in several places around the country, mainly on the basis of mail art. In the core of these activities there was a need to provoke the authorities, which the artists expressed with an ironic, mystified attitude towards the act of nodding in agreement with the system. By taking strategies of indoctrination typical for the communist system, escalating its logic and creating a pastiche of its rhetoric, the artists made art out of the scale of absurd that was ever-present in the communist countries. As a framework of their activities they used the over-expanded bureaucracy in socialist Poland, encompassing all spheres of life, including art. Hence, the artists used prints, posters, stamps and leaflets, etc., and as a result created the effect of, as Žižek would call it, “over-identification” with the official rituals that made their everyday lives unbearable, and stigmatized their consciousness. [E. Jarosz]

Individual Conversations, an action by Leszek Przyjemski and Anastazy Wiśniewski took place in 1972 as part of the Non-existent Nodding Gallery “Yes” (1970–1974) programme. For its temporary premises, the artists chose Paweł Freisler’s Repassage Gallery in Warsaw which presented counter-culture activities of the neo-avant-garde of the 1970s. It gathered alumni and professors of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, which Przyjemski and Wiśniewski referred to with their poster placed on the door: “Gallery/ – YES – /Krakowskie Przedmieście 24/ Individual Conversations/ Professors 10-12/ Students 18-20/ 12-04-72”. The Gallery “Yes” stemmed from the traditions of conceptual art offering a juxtaposition to the programme of the Defying Gallery “No” (1970) founded by Anastazy Wiśniewski. It also gave rise to fictitious anti-institutions of art that Przyjemski later founded to defy the artistic mainstream of socialist Poland. The programme of the gallery was implemented in several places around the country, mainly on the basis of mail art. In the core of these activities there was a need to provoke the authorities, which the artists expressed with an ironic, mystified attitude towards the act of nodding in agreement with the system. By taking strategies of indoctrination typical for the communist system, escalating its logic and creating a pastiche of its rhetoric, the artists made art out of the scale of absurd that was ever-present in the communist countries. As a framework of their activities they used the over-expanded bureaucracy in socialist Poland, encompassing all spheres of life, including art. Hence, the artists used prints, posters, stamps and leaflets, etc., and as a result created the effect of, as Žižek would call it, “over-identification” with the official rituals that made their everyday lives unbearable, and stigmatized their consciousness.
Individual Conversations is one of the best-known actions of the gallery creators. The title conversations were held in a fake room of the party, arranged especially for the action, which the artists used to hold talks with potential candidates for party members. The room was decorated with white and red canvas and potted ferns. Ostentatious use of occasional decorations from the times of real socialism later became a sort of a trademark of Przyjemski’s artistic work. People willing to take part in a simulation of joining the party were invited to the little room, where Przyjemski and Wiśniewski asked them a series of ridiculous questions. At the end of each talk a deafening melody of the Internationale was put on. An anecdote says that Jan Himilsbach and Zdzisław Maklakiewicz, a legendary acting duo, were to be volunteers but having arrived late, after the designated time of interviews, they were not let inside. The story proves that the talks were always held according to regulations and with due solemnity of the situation.
Documentation of the action, donated to the collection of CoCA, comprises four photographs. One of them shows Przyjemski lying on the floor of the party’s room wallowing in the redness of the flag fabric lining the whole interior. Hypnotised by the light of a centrally placed lamp covered by the red cloth, he metaphorically raises himself above the mediocrity of the pastiched formal situation. His comfortable pose is in contrast with the image of oppressive reality of the socialist state, in which the citizens’ bodies and their behaviour were subject to discipline on various levels. The photo also refers to a poster by Przyjemski, entitled My favourite landscape, created independently from the activity of the anti-gallery and exhibited at the Dreamers Convention (1971, 4th Biennial of Spatial Forms) in Elbląg. It is the first work in which Przyjemski used the motif of the national flag. The inclusion of the Non-existent Nodding Gallery “Yes” documentation in the collection of CoCA surely is a pertinent recognition of an important phenomenon in Polish neo-avant-garde art of the 1970s – a phenomenon that still requires a thorough study. [E. Jarosz]