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death, was something that Szajna was also trying to convey. But Szajna, as I mentioned, was much more influenced by aesthetic categories. In his case we deal with something that some critics call the “obsession with death”. All of his productions refer to death, to his own traumatic experience of Auschwitz and the World War II. Costumes with holes as if from machine gun bullets, tattooed numbers, rotten planks, pipes, parts of gallows, striped camp uniforms, broken crosses, heaps of old shoes, human figures similar to shooting targets; all these leitmotif are attributes of the image of death. But in the form and context in which Szajna was putting all those anaesthetic elements – they turned into high-artistic signs. In contrast to Kantor, Szajna’s art is much more connected with moral duty than with revealing its references to life. In his theatre another important dimension becomes important – that of responsibility: ethics must precede aesthetics. Szajna’s art, although it grows from the impulse of Craig’s aesthetic vision of theatre, also has a different, added role — which is “not to forget”.
Seeking for Craig’s “seeds,” one can discover the process of “capricious tradition,” which is dynamic, and has the power to change the original meaning of the notions, ideas and concepts, and their application in new aesthetic, historical, and existential frameworks. It was not my thesis to compare these conceptions, (as an inspiration is something dynamic, inextricable from the artistic process) but to show how such a utopian vision, treated as a very basic theory of art from the beginning of the century, could inspire concepts of art intricately connected with very specific history, and could be used in new social and aesthetic contexts. My focus is theoretical, as it was in that domain that influences and allusions became the most visible. I chose only fragments of these three artistic concepts and sometimes I had to distil them from their biographical and historical contexts, to be able to find their particularity and locate their transformative impacts on the deep structure of artistic thinking.
REFERENCES 1
Stanislavsky C. My Life in Art, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1924, pp. 92-93.
1978) reprint: Kantor T. Pisma, 1975-1984, vol. 2, Kraków: Ossolineum, Cricoteca, 2004, p. 447.
Theatre tradition is mainly based on theatrical theories, ideas, concepts, projects and drawings of set designs. Although this seems too obvious, Stanislavski reminds us of this special side of theatre history. Because each performance – treated as a piece of art – is unique, the one and only and it can not remain. That’s why Stanislavski states that what „retains life (...) is the great eternal which creates its own and new eternal”. The elements of theatrical cultural texts can be easily changed, reversed, transplanted in the body of new work of art, but the essence still there exists.
7 And if we evoke also for example the Shakespearean maxim, that all the world is a stage, which is one of the realisations of this topos, it is clear that according to Craig, it was possible to see life in theatrical categories and that is why art must precede life, not contrarily.
2
See the interpretation of Nietzschean notion in the Vuarnet J.-N. Le philosophe-artiste, Paris: Leo Scheer, 2004, especially the chapter about artist-philosopherutopianist. 3
I use the notion: “transcendental” in its romantic sense. Romantic artists and critics, especially connected with German idealists, created the notion of “transcendental poetry”. The notion: “transcendental” was first used by Kant in his epistemology. Friedrich Schlegel transformed it into the realm of aesthetics, postulating such poetry in which the artist should reveal himself also as a philosopher. Of course Craig’s essays can not be treated as poetry, but I think that his highly sophisticated, multi-stylistic discourse may be seen as his individualistic way of philosophising about art, and it may be inscribed into the category of widely understood – transcendental discourse. 4
Craig created a distinctive form of expressing himself as an artist through language. 5
6
Quotation from the press conference (Krzysztofory:
For Craig there was no ‘today,’ just ‘yesterday’ as a source of ideas, influences, and ‘tomorrow’ when all these could be realised through the genius of the artist. The eternal essence of Kantor’s theatre: ur-matterie was also beyond time: present time. Time in art, as he often stressed, approaches in his understanding the conception of eternity. Eternity was for him suspended between the perfect aspect of the future tense, an extraordinary coexistence of artists, epochs and works. But, unlike Craig, as I mentioned above, his artistic gesture and work was never ‘beyond history’. Ur-matterie was eternal but its realisation, the process of bringing it into reality, was always connected with history. 8
Quotation from Pleśniarowicz K. The Dead Memory Machine, Kraków: Cricoteca, 1994, p. 154.
9
At the beginning of his artistic journey Kantor was impressed with symbolism and constructivism. The tensions between these two trends would remain at the foundation of all his work, both as a painter and theatre artist. Symbolism, as Kantor used to stress, was the heritage of Polish tradition, which for him was considerable. He used to refer to Wyspiański and to “Krakow’s royal castle with its ghosts of Polish kings”. But his way of thinking and of using symbolism and its stylistic elements was also a heritage of Craig’s vision of theatre. Constructivism was fundamentally the herita10