https://doi.org/10.52652/e.6.24.2The article analyses a selection of texts that accompany exhibits in museum exhibitions (so‑called popular science panels and tombstone labels). It attempts to demonstrate the extent to which such texts rely on the ordering discourse of art history as it is traditionally understood, the structuring of such narratives in relation to such topics as the integrity of the artwork, identity, history, restoring to memory, and the relationship between the presentation of the curatorial concept/interpretation and the description of the exhibit itself. The aim of the article is also to suggest a revision of this ordering scheme in relation to the possibilities offered by a gaze that goes beyond traditional methodology, as well as to provide a critique of established discourses and terminologies to create conditions facilitating a more direct relationship between the viewer and the work.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.6.24.3The article From the Open University to the Monstrous Museum, or How to Build Allied Institutions introduces the concept of allied institution, constructed on earlier and parallel theories and practices of the open university, museum of the commons, sustainable museum, critical museum, and the Museum of Current Art. An allied institution is, above all, a place, though sometimes without a building. It is a situation in which located interdependencies, less often called relations or (most reluctantly) networking, are practised. It is a place that uses its (im)possibilities to amplify the voices of marginalised people and groups, applying for this purpose strange tools of art. An allied institution can be a city gallery, museum, informal collective, non-governmental organization and/or a regular event, what matters is the stability provided by instituent practice that creates the right conditions for a given activity to continue. An allied institution is a place operating in a local social and environmental context, while at the same time establishing transnational networks of solidarity and cooperation. There is something monstrous about an allied institution as it has no clearly defined boundaries, undergoes frequent changes and is multitudinous; when one of its heads is severed, ten more appear.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.6.24.4In times of widespread lack of trust, unstable relationships, stifled initiative, it is easy to forego the sense of community. Cieszyn Traditional Craft School, referring to the sense of local identity based on the cultural heritage of the region, is an initiative aimed at social bonding.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.6.24.5This text contrasts the culture politics of 1990s Slovakia during the autocratic rule of Vladimír Mečiar with the politics of the ruling coalition, led by Robert Fico, after the 2023 elections. The starting point for this analysis is The Corridor of Two Banalities (1994), an installation piece of Joseph Kosuth and Ilya Kabakov from the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, also presented at the Museum of Art in Žilina (1996). It compares the cultural policies of “Meciarism” to those of current Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová, associated with the ideology of national culture and autocratic exercise of power without professional dialogue. The piece draws attention to the government’s suppressive actions, that tend toward hijacking rule of law and the destruction of free culture and independent media. Using controversial statements by politicians to illustrate the escalation of tension, it remarks on civil society resistance in Slovakia.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.6.24.6Examining the evolution of the concept of the conservative swing, I have tried to answer the question on the role which art competitions played in the past decade and on the extent to which the crisis of institutions in Poland impacted their operation. I have put forward the theory that the disappearance of prestigious, institutional interdisciplinary competitions could have contributed to changes in the creative strategies of the youngest individuals. Although the new situation of narrowed career paths clearly impacted individual choices of means of expression, in art criticism it is not perceived as a significant context for attempts to diagnose the state of the field. This text is an attempt to broaden this perspective to include art competitions not only as tools for building individual careers, but also for regulating the visibility of disciplines in the field of art.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.6.24.7The author of the text focuses on how in the art project initiated by the group of Slovenian artists Neue Slowenische Kunst, consisting in the transformation of the group from an artistic collective to a state organism, the line between an autonomous work of art and political engagement is blurred. It outlines the context of the establishment of NSK and a brief history of the group’s activity before the State in Time project, marking the beginning of the collective’s transformation into the State. It pays special attention to the NSK passports, which later become a contribution to the evolution of the project. It analyses passports as mimetic tools used to materialise the material aspects of the state and as art objects with specific aesthetics and production technique. It then presents how the NSK passports became a vehicle for further transformations of the project into an organism beyond the artists’ control. It presents the case of the use of passports by people from Nigeria, which were to allow emigration to Europe, and the initiative to make the NSK State independent of its creators through a gathering of passports holders. Relating the case of NSK to contemporary theories on participation in art, it considers the significance of the project for further hybridisation of art and politics.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.6.24.8The article indicates that contemporary crises – ecological, social and epistemological – call for alternative ways of cognition. Rather than honouring the traditional division between body and mind, I propose methodologies that embrace materiality and affectivity, uniting body, senses and imagination in cognitive processes. I investigate the paradigm shift in the perception of the world – from linear, individualistic cognition to more entangled, relational processes, produced by new materialist approaches, including the Gaia theory. This perspective suggests the crucial importance of collective responsibility which not only recognises our linkage with more‑than‑human entities, but allows for the socioeconomic contexts that shape our lives. The article adopts this viewpoint to direct attention to the potential of experimental educational methods that facilitate emancipation from the rigid logic of productivity and individualism, providing space for imagination and development of collective responsibility in the face of global crises.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.6.24.9The article begins with an outline of the process of decolonising the visible in the field of art. The focus of this paper is on two extreme cases from Latin America: masp and malba, to be seen as two opposite poles in a broad spectrum of attitudes and strategies employed by the managers of the Latin American institutions under study. The article discusses different approaches and the changes introduced to the museums, providing a basis for further reflection on human and organisational circumstances of decolonisation. Ultimately, the text offers some conclusions drawn from Latin American experiences.
The article offers an analysis of Adrienne Rich’s poem Diving into the Wreck in reference to storying exposure and the aesthetics of withdrawal, setting its interpretation in the context of the blue humanities and the critique of academic extractivism. The proposed reading hinges on the hybrid forms of the wreck – in the material and metaphorical sense – underscoring their relatedness to systemic exploitation in higher education and ecocritical reflection on the environmental disaster happening in the oceans. Water, and especially the seabed, is where the diver is confronted with all sorts of hybrid forms, from fantastic beings to degraded objects of technoculture. Bonding Cecilia Åsberg’s concept of “storying exposure” with the proposal of a blue turn in cultural studies, inspired by Anna Olszewska’s programmatic appreciation of passive components of creativity, the text argues that following the trajectory of immersion and crisis can become a gesture of resistance and a way of regaining subjectivity. The key element of the analysis is immersion as a regenerative strategy – in an aesthetic as well as political sense – that facilitates a critical reevaluation of the dynamics of productivism in relation to the Capitalocene. A contribution to the interdisciplinary debate on the future of academia and the humanities, the text suggests that a blue turn in cultural studies necessitates a revision of the relationship between body, knowledge and environment.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.6.24.11The text attempts to combine post‑Darwinian and psychoanalytic takes on the phenomenon of social media, along with the inquiries that map them, by proposing that social media communities and people active in their virtual spaces constitute a contemporary form of religion. The article references Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, also quoting the example of Instagram and, broadly, the medium of photography.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.6.24.12This essay describes the art schools in the UK as institutions driven solely by an imperative to survive. It challenges the conditions and the ideology under which art schools created generations of artists since the 1970s and their reaction to the economic, social, and political upheavals of the past decade. The text makes a comparison between the current expansion in the training of psychotherapists – today’s cognitive professionals of the future – and the socially positive motivations for the expansion of art schools. The text suggests that having failed to transform itself and being of little practical use to societies, art schools will face competition from other, more overtly instrumental cognitive disciplines. The freedom which they promise, however, will be as short‑lived as that of mass art education.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.6.24.13The paper uses institutional critique to analyse critical media, posing the question whether the content they publish indicates that they are aware of the role they play in discourse and their dominant position. The main research method is critical discourse analysis which was employed to examine 184 critical texts, reviews, interviews and news items published in 2023 by three periodicals: Szum, Notes na 6 Tygodni (Nn6T) and Dwutygodnik. The results have revealed the over‑representation of Warsaw galleries and institutions, predominance of Warsaw‑based critics and negative reviews of exhibitions organised elsewhere in the country. Male critics continue to occupy a dominant position. The main conclusion is that criticism continuously reproduces the problematic status quo of the Polish art world
