<p>Tomasz Szerszeń</p>
<p>Tomasz Szerszeń</p>

No. 1: The Visibility of Things

Managing editor: Tomasz Szerszeń

Tomasz Szerszeń

This issue was supported by the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education, through the “National Programme for the Development of the Humanities” for the years 2012-2014.

Table of Contents

Introduction

  1. Introduction

    ”Introduction ”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1363

    Introduction to issue 1.

    keywords: things; materiality; everyday life; visibility

Perspectives

  1. You. Me. Things. „World as an Archive. Critical Modes of Historicity” – Seminar 1

    Krzysztof Pijarski, Justyna Jaworska, Klara Czerniewska, Tomasz Szerszeń, Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska, Adam Mazur, Paweł Mościcki, Magda Szcześniak, Marek Zaleski, Katarzyna Bojarska
    Krzysztof Pijarski, Justyna Jaworska et al., ”You. Me. Things. „World as an Archive. Critical Modes of Historicity””, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1337

    The transcript of a seminar discussion around the photographic and research project of Tomasz Szerszeń, You. Me. Things with participation of researchers and artists interested in visual culture, design, photography, literature and popular culture. The discussion concentrates on the topic of the archive understood both as a subject of research and as an artistic and academic practice. The participants exchange opinions on the material and visual culture of postwar Poland, the heritage of the aesthetics and the cultural critique of the 60s., relations between East and West in the field of consumer culture, needs and desires, of bourgeois culture and the cult of things.

    keywords: design; PRL; material culture; visual culture; popular culture; photography

Close-up

  1. Promises-Cut-Outs, or „You and I” magazine as a Catalogue of Things Unfulfilled

    Iwona Kurz
    Iwona Kurz, ”Promises-Cut-Outs, or „You and I” magazine as a Catalogue of Things”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1338

    The author attempts at describing the role played by the journal „You and I” – as well as things in general – in collective imagination of the Poles in 1960s. Literary and filmic examples as well as the practices of the journal’s editors are being juxtaposed with the situation in the West which provided an ultimate point of referrence and aspiration for Polish society.

    keywords: You and I; collective imagination; 1960s; press; things

  2. Critical Archives of the Everyday

    Paweł Mościcki
    Paweł Mościcki, ”Critical Archives of the Everyday”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1339

    The text draws our attention to theoretical contexts of an artistic project “I. You. Things” by Tomasz Szerszeń. It tries to analyze three main lines of inquiry: Henri Lefevbre’s critic of the everyday, Guy Debord’s critic of the society of spectacle and Georges Perec’s critic of consumption society. In each case the author tends to show the pertinence of the concept of the archive and the ways in which artistic project can comment on and develop theoretical problems. The important aspect of the article is also the suggestion that archival reflections can bring substantial insights to the debates about both recent history and actual everyday practice.

    keywords: Tomasz Szerszeń; Henri Lefevbre; everyday; Guy Debord; society of spectacle; Georges Perec; consumption society

  3. The Idea of Things and the Ideas in Them

    Bill Brown
    Bill Brown, ”The Idea of Things and the Ideas in Them”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1340

    In this excerpt from the introduction to A Sense of Things Bill Brown examines the relationship between the surface and inside of objects in American modernist poetry. Drawing inspiration from William Carlos William’s phrase „No ideas but in things”, Brown investigates the possibility of the existence of ideas in things (instead of ideas of things). In his analysis, the author looks at the poetry of Williams, Paul Strand’s photography, as well as essays by Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire (both about the experience of children) and proposes a framework of thinking with things, while also posing questions about contemporary social relations of humans and things.

    keywords: American modernist poetry; William Carlos William; ideas in things

  4. From Uma to Puma. The Role of the Counterfeit during the Polish Transformation

    Magda Szcześniak
    Magda Szcześniak, ”From Uma to Puma. The Role of the Counterfeit during ”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1341

    The article examines the social life of things in Poland during the so-called transition. By focusing on the category of the counterfeit, the author describes the process of the development of Western capitalist valorizations of commodities in the post-communist social reality. Through recalling Marx’s canonical text on commodity fetishism, as well as its commentaries by visual and material culture scholars, the author investigates the status of commodities and brands in the 90’s in Poland. The figure of the counterfeit becomes an analytical tool, albeit one which also transforms itself when applied to specific material.

    keywords: transition; counterfeit; commodity; commodity fetishism; 1990s

Panorama

  1. Toys For Dialecticians

    Adam Lipszyc
    Adam Lipszyc, ”Toys For Dialecticians”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1342

    The article analyzes four short texts by Walter Benjamin about toys. The author of the article reconstructs the most important theoretical theses of these small notes, which place the category of a toy in the context of such concepts as play, imitation and repetition. Then, juxtaposing them with other, more fundamental dimensions of Benjamin’s thought, the author tries to give this concept an additional dimension and outline a special "dialectic of the toy", the logic according to which the toy would be an indispensable requisite of repetitive play serving to curb traumatic events, but at the same time it would itself be a remnant of the traumatic, and as such it would destroy the cohesiveness of the habits drawn from play.

    keywords: Walter Benjamin; toy; trauma; play; imitation; repetition

  2. Listing: Activating versus Frustrating Memory.

    Ernst van Alphen
    Ernst van Alphen, ”Listing: Activating versus Frustrating Memory.”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1343

    The author analyses the archival structure of the list mostly on the literaty examples taken from the oeuvre of Georges Perec but also from the theoretical and literary work by Roland Barthes and a couple of examples from the artistic practice of French visual artist, Sophie Calle. Van Alphen looks at various functions played by the lists he discusses, concentrating mostly on the memory, recollection and reconstruction as well as representation. He is intrested in narrative and anti-narrative potential of the list.

    keywords: list; Georges Perec; Roland Barthes; Sophie Calle; memory; recollection

  3. Photo Magazines as Narratives on Photography

    Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska
    Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska, ”Photo Magazines as Narratives on Photography”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1344

    The text is a critical account devoted to the problems of “artistic photography” in Poland during the fifties and sixties and the controversies concerning the question of photographic abstraction (the works of, among others, Marek Piasecki, Bronisław Schlabs and Andrzej Pawłowski). The author examines the specificity of medium (photo magazines): rather the “discursive sites” than documents.

    keywords: Marek Piasecki; Bronisław Schlabs; Andrzej Pawłowski; photography; photo magazines; 1950s; 1960s; artistic photography

  4. An Archaeology of Modernism: James Welling's Lock as „Theoretical Object”

    Krzysztof Pijarski
    Krzysztof Pijarski, ”An Archaeology of Modernism: James Welling's Lock as ”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1348

    Taking as its point of departure Andre Bazin's assertion that "every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image", the article has two aims: firstly, to look at the ways in which in and through photography the objecthood of the represented thing may come to the fore, and secondly, how contemporary photography that one might call "artistic" can be interpreted as an answer to the crisis of the object in art; a crisis triggered, or rather - acknowledged by the artists involved in minimal art in the 1960s. The article is based mostly on texts by Michael Fried, Stanley Cavell and Walter Benn Michaels, with James Welling's Lock and Bernd and Hilla Becher's Typologies as key objects of analysis.

    keywords: James Welling; modernism; archeology; 1960s; photography; representation

Viewpoint

  1. Me. You. Things

    Tomasz Szerszeń
    Tomasz Szerszeń, ”Me. You. Things”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1976

    Presentation of Tomasz Szerszeń's Ty.Ja.Rzeczy project.

    keywords: Tomasz Szerszeń; everyday; things

  2. “My Apartment Is My Hobby”

    Justyna Jaworska
    Justyna Jaworska, ”“My Apartment Is My Hobby””, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1349

    “My Luxury Apartment Is My Hobby” was the title of the column dedicated to interior design which in the magazine “You and I”, nearly from the very beginning, i.e. from 1960, was edited by the stage designer, Felicja Uniechowska. The case study of this column one can trace the lifestyle and aspirations of contemporary bohemians and intelligentsia since the inhabitants of the apartments represented quite a homogenous social group. Photographs which illustrated the column reveal fashions in interior design and the snobberies but also provide a visual (self)portrait of the era of “little stablisation” - it seems equally interested what is presented on these images and that which is not depicted, shown or exposed. The article was inspired by the exhibition You. Me. Things and it refers among other things to Pierre Bourdieu’s category of distinction and to the category of comfort.

    keywords: apartment; You and I; 1960s; Felicja Uniechowska; Pierre Bourdieu; distinction; photographs; interior design

  3. Black Market Next To My Name

    Daniel Malone
    Daniel Malone, ”Black Market Next To My Name”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1975

    Daniel Malone's art project "Black Market Next To My Name".

    keywords: Daniel Malone; things; black market; market

  4. "There is No Way You Can Frame It." Daniel Malone's "Black Market"

    Krzysztof Pijarski
    Krzysztof Pijarski, ”"There is No Way You Can Frame It." Daniel Malone's "Black Market"”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1350

    Krzysztof Pijarski's commentary on Daniel Malone's "Black Market".

    keywords: Daniel Malone; things; black market; informal economy

Snapshots

  1. I don't Have an Iconographer's Eye!

    Mateusz Salwa
    Mateusz Salwa, ”I don't Have an Iconographer's Eye!”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1351

    A review of the Polish translation of Daniel Arasse's On n'y voit rien (Nie widać nic, transl. by Anna Arno, DodoEditor, Kraków 2012).

    keywords: Daniela Arasse; iconography; visibility

  2. Power Doesn't Look, Power Visualises

    Łukasz Zaremba
    Łukasz Zaremba, ”Power Doesn't Look, Power Visualises”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1352

    An essay dedicated to the changes in perspective in Nicolas Mirzoeff's research. A review of his book, The Right to Look. A Counterhistory of Visuality, Duke University Press, Durham – London 2011.

    keywords: Nicholas Mirzoeff; counterhistory; visuality; visual culture; power

  3. Photography Like Ether

    Paula Kaniewska
    Paula Kaniewska, ”Photography Like Ether”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2013.1.1353

    A review of the exhibition Ether by Katarzyna Mirczak at the Archeology of Photography Foundation (09.11.2012 – 10.01.2013).

    keywords: Katarzyna Mirczak; photography; things; boxes; ether