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HERVÉ FISCHER AND JAN ŚWIDZIŃSKI
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Encounters
1 - Art’s context and social reality: Hervé Fischer
and Jan
Świdziński
Created on
Tuesday, 03 October 2017 12:55
Written by
Juliane Debeusscher
The Centre
Pompidou in Paris recently presented "Hervé Fischer and
Sociological
Art", a retrospective exhibition synthesizing more than
four
decades of activity of this artist, sociologist and researcher. Hervé
Fischer
(1941) started to work in France in the early 1970s and moved
to Canada
in the early 1980s. Both individually and as a member of the
Collectif
d'Art Sociologique (Sociological Art Collective) which he
founded in
1974 with Fred Forest and Jean-Paul Thénot, Hervé Fischer
carried on an artistic and theoretical
practice that addressed art's
ideological
meanings and functions in society.
From his
first artistic project recognized as "sociological art"
(Hygiène de
l'art, 1971) till the mid-1980s, Fischer's approach was
informed by
a materialist conception of the role of artistic production
and its
impact on a specific context. It also included an important
pedagogical
dimension that led the artist to foster different types of
participation
and interactions with an audience that was not necessarily
familiar
with contemporary art.[1]
Hervé Fischer et l'Art Sociologique, Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Exhibition
view.
Public
performances like Pharmacie Fischer (1974-1977) –
a traveling
pharmacist's desk where pills for all sorts of pains and dreams
were
prescribed by the artist – and Bureau of Imaginary Identity (1976-1981)
– with the artist-bureaucrat filling an
imaginary ID card for each person
willing to
apply - reflected his will to intervene in what he referred to as
"the
real world" and explore the social imaginary of specific places. Although
these
performances took place in cities like Milan, Sao Paulo, Perpignan or
Calgary,
they were not confined to urban centers but also traveled to smaller
towns and
villages.
While Hervé
Fischer's projects mostly relied on methodologies and tools
borrowed
from the field of social sciences, such as surveys and fieldwork
research,
they also entailed a poetic and utopian dimension, raising issues
like
people's desires and aspirations and documenting their unpredictable
answers.
Launched as a survey in a national newspaper, L'Oiseau-chat.
Roman-enquête sur l'identité québécoise (The bird-cat. Novel-survey about
Quebecoise
identity) actually became a hybrid book collecting individual
narratives
between reality and fiction of the self.[2]
While this
sociological approach aimed at exploring the relation between art
and its
social environment; it also voluntarily moved away from large-scale
frames like
institutional structures and state cultural policies, focusing instead
on the
experience of specific communities and milieus (neighborhoods, social
groups).
This perspective reflected in a sense the "community-based" work and
research
many activists and social workers, as well as engaged film and
documentary-makers,
were carrying out at that time.
Like many
artists of his generation eager to communicate across the cultural,
linguistic
and geopolitical divides, Hervé Fischer received and exchanged
information
with peers from different places and latitudes. His name and
address
appeared in numerous artists' mailing lists that were an alternative to
institutional
communication channels. The artist's personal archive, conserved
in part in
the Kandinsky Library (Centre George Pompidou, Paris), reflects
these
international connections: letters, invitations, leaflets and publications
from
different interlocutors in North and Latin America, Western and Eastern
Europe.
Jan
Świdziński at the Ecole Sociologique Internationale, Paris, 1977. Image
coutres of
Hervé Fischer.
Among Fischer's
contacts from Eastern Europe was Polish artist Jan Świdziński
(1923-2014),
who was developing during those same years his theory and practice
based on
the idea of contextual art.[3]
Świdziński was the author of the manifesto
"Art as Contextual Art" (1976),
published
in Sweden in 1976, assembled with other programmatic texts in a
bilingual
publication by the Remont Gallery (Warsaw) in 1977.[4]
It is not
surprising that the two artists were in contact, as their reflections on
art as a
social practice shared important points (and differed on others). Fischer
and
Świdziński had in common a well-articulated theoretical reflection about art
and
artists' role - presented by means of statements or manifestos –combined
with an
artistic practice that truly engaged with specific territories and social
milieus.
They also vigorously escaped the dominant rhetoric of conceptual art,
especially
its Anglo-Saxon version centered on art's analysis through linguistics.
Fischer
criticized it for its idealistic and tautological perspective, which concealed
the existence of any external (meaning,
ideological) conditioning.[5]
According to Świdziński, "[c]ontextual
artists oppose the whole tradition of
conceptual
art, regarding it as an art which cannot be the answer to the
problems of
modern civilization. They also oppose all modifications of
contemporary
Modernism as being a stylistic version of art of the past." His
position
was clear, situating contextual art out of the sphere of aesthetics:
"Contextual
Art is a social practice. Theoretical generalizations do not interest
it. It is
not concerned with the production of prepared objects for cultural
consumption.
Contextual Art is a form of acting in reality, through the
following
transformation of meanings: REALITY → INFORMATION → ART
→ NEW OPEN
MEANINGS → REALITY as a pure sign, cleansed of stereotypes;
a sign
which is filled by the present reality."[6] A position shared by Fischer
and
the
Collectif d'Art Sociologique who were opposed to attitudes conditioned by
academic
knowledge and discourse: "the concrete reality of the experiments
carried
out. Our aim is neither art nor sociology, but intervention in the social
field. Art
and sociology are only the means."[7]
Beyond
their own specificities and operating fields, contextual art and sociological
art undoubtedly shared a universalist,
inclusive dimension in which, for instance,
the
distinction between centers and peripheries completely lost its relevance. While
on one hand
these practices could not exist as autonomous aesthetic productions
and, as
such, remained out of traditional art locations and white cubes, on the other
hand this
same condition gave them a very broad field of action, since they could
inhabit any
context or environment without restriction. Being defined by the reality
in which
they operated, these practices were not limited to a capitalist or a
communist
society, they escaped any attempt to identify them as typical. They
applied atypical theoretical and
methodological principles to act in specific
contexts.
Differences and specificity lied in this relation and the responses it
produced.
Jan Świdziński, Sztuka jako sztuka kontekstual/Art as Contextual Art, Art
Text 3/77,
Warsaw: Galerija Remont, 1977.
Świdziński's
manifesto on contextual art and its twelve points were used as a
point of
reference by a group of artists consisting of Świdziński himself, Roman
and Anna
Kutera and Leszek Mrożek. In 1976, they collectively exhibited at
the Gallery
St Petri in Lund (Sweden) under the title "Contextual art".[8] As
Świdziński
recalled, they were particularly interested in realizing actions in rural
settings,
arguing that these were the places where real "authentic
collectivities"
still
remained, as opposed to the cities where, according to him, the communist
system had fostered impersonal groups of
proletarians in order to serve the
objectives
of socialist industry.[9] Artistic actions by Świdziński and his
colleagues
in remote places like the Kurpie region (in the 1970s) or the small
village of
Mielnik (1981) drew attention to the process of erasure of ancient
local
identities and their replacement by a new imposed vision of the world,
"based
on an ideology that did not take individuals' realities and interests into
account."
These incursions into local contexts were not always successful, since
local
communities could not react as expected. However, the possibility of failure
or
inadequacy of artists' proposals for this context was an integral part of the
action,
as Świdziński observed: "Our successes
and our failures reflected in one way or
another, the context of the current
reality."[10]
Hervé
Fischer, Sinalização Imaginària, intervention in the public space, Sao
Paulo,
1981.
Were these
failures also dictated by the sociopolitical conditions of living under
a Communist
authoritarian regime? Actions themselves did not explicitly refer
to Poland's
situation. In some cases however, they could be interpreted as a
political
commentary and the authorities promptly reacted by censoring them,
as in the
case of "Freedom and Limitations", Świdziński's solo exhibition in
Krakow,
which was cancelled due to the proclamation of martial law on December
13th, 1981.
The only remnants were posters announcing the exhibition in the streets,
showing the artist's name and the words Freedom and limitations, a statement
that
was
enigmatic yet meaningful in such a tense context.
Also in
1981, Hervé Fischer carried out with a group of art students a project for
the Sao
Paulo Biennial. Sinalização Imaginària (Imaginary Sign System), which consisted
of a series of posters displayed in public space, juxtaposing names of
city
districts with concepts (Liberdade, Realidade, Consolação), with arrows
indicatit
a – true or
false? - direction. While the formal similarity of the two interventions
is
striking, it should above all raise the issue of the "contextualized"
reception and
the
attributed meanings of this type of socially-oriented art. Did the display or
manifestation of this abstract terminology have the same ambiguous and,
eventually, politicized meaning in both contexts? Did it penetrate into
people's reality in the
same way?
Fischer had a position on this: "for me, in France, sociological art had
to remain
interrogative, and not become a politically engaged art."[11] However,
the
transposition of his practice to other contexts ineluctably transformed its
meanings
and social impact, as the very nature of "sociological" or
"contextual" art implied.
In 1975,
Hervé Fischer participated in the collective exhibition "The forms of
artistic
activity", organized by Galeria Współczesna in Warsaw. He returned to
Poland in
1977 with the whole Collectif d'Art Sociologique to participate in the
international conference "Art Activity in the Context of Reality",
organized by Świdziński at the Galeria Remont, also in Warsaw. As he
retrospectively observed,
while
sociological art was received with interest in socialist countries, "they
did
not like
the word 'sociological' because with Communist dictatorship, that was
enough:
above all, people wanted freedom outside the social institution. So the
concept of
sociological art didn't work in Central Europe. The Pole Jan Świdziński,
who stayed
quite often at my place, spoke more readily of a 'contextual' art."[12]
The idea of
a social, collective dimension was automatically associated with state
ideology, provoking suspicion and rejection.
Poster of
the exhibition “The forms of artistic activity” at Galeria Współczesna
in Warsaw,
1975. From Hervé Fischer's personal archive.
Exchange
and dialogue were nevertheless maintained on a regular basis. In May
1977,
Świdziński was invited to give a lecture at the École Sociologique
Interrogative
(Interrogative Sociological School) in Paris, in the context of the
conference
"Art et transformation sociale". Both artists also participated in
the
conference
on Contextual Art organized in Toronto by the Centre for Experimental
Art and
Communication, in 1976. It is worth pointing out that Canada was an
important
place for the two artists, where their work and writings circulated and
gained
visibility through a multiplicity of channels. Hervé Fischer has actively
contributed – and still is - to the country's art scene and its debates; until
his death
in 2014,
Świdziński was frequently invited to Canada to participate in events and
his
writings were published under the form of articles and essays.
Despite
their constant engagement with activities and debates relating to art and
society,
both also recognized their marginality within the art world and market. The
term
"marginal" here is not related to a geographical or geopolitical
situation –
according a
centre-periphery scheme which very often excludes a lot of degrees of
self-representation-,
but rather to an art praxis that did not follow the law of market
and
institutional recognition, and, perhaps most importantly, did not seek to go
against
them or criticize them either. It was simply taking place in another space
of
construction and reception. Curiously, and also quite ironically, this critical
attitude
of
sociologically and contextually-oriented art has been somehow forgotten or
neglected
in subsequent readings, reducing their – also - experimental, non-object-
based
practices in the 1970s to (post-)conceptual art, or a kind of "politicized
conceptualism" which seems such an attractive concept nowadays.
Endnotes
[1] Hervé Fischer, "Signification de l'art
sociologique", 1974, Hervé Fischer
Fund,
Kandinsky Library, Centre Pompidou Paris. Reproduced in Sophie
Duplaix (ed.), Hervé Fischer et l'art sociologique, Paris:
Manuela Editions, 2017, 60.
The
exhibition Hervé Fischer et l'art sociologique/Hervé Fischer and Sociological
Art curated
by Sophie Duplaix remained on display at the Centre Pompidou from
June 15th
to September 11th, 2017. I thank Hervé Fischer for the information and
the images
he accepted to provide for this post.
[2] Hervé Fischer, L'Oiseau-chat. Roman-enquête sur
l'identité québécoise (The
bird-cat. Novel-survey about Quebecoise identity), Montreal:
La Presse, 1981.
[3] On Świdziński, see Łukasz Ronduda, "Flexibility
makes our existence possible:
the contextual art of Jan Świdziński", ArtMargins
Online, 10 september 2008.
http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/8-archive/88-flexibility-makes-our-existence-possible-the-contextual-art-of-jan-widziski
; Kazimierz Piotrowski, "Hommage à
Jan
Świdziński", Sztuka i Dokumentacja, nr 8, 2013, 79-95.
[4] Jan
Świdziński, Art as contextual art, Lund: Ed. Sellem Galerie S. Petri Archive
of
Experimental Art, 1976. Jan Świdziński, Sztuka jako sztuka kontekstual / Art as
contextual art, Art Text 3/77, Warsaw : Galerija Remont, 1977.
[5] Hervé Fischer, Théorie de l'Art Sociologique (1977), 15.
Digital version: http://classiques.uqac.ca/contemporains/fischer_herve/theorie_art_sociologique/
theorie_art_sociologique.pdf
[6] Jan
Świdziński, Sztuka jako sztuka kontekstual/ Art as contextual art, 7.
[7] Hervé Fischer, Théorie de l'Art Sociologique, 19.
[8] The artists exhibiting were Zbigniew Dłubak, Józef
Robakowski, Ryszard
Waśko, Wojciech Bruszewski, Henryk Gajewski, Andrzej
Jórczak, Anna
Kutera, Romuald
Kutera, Lech Mrożek, Jan Świdziński. The exhibition
was
organized with the help of the Union of Polish Art Photographers.
[9] Jan Świdziński, "La pratique contextuelle",
Inter, n°93, 2006.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Sophie Duplaix (ed.), Hervé Fischer et l'art
sociologique, 21.
[12] Ibid,
21.
