The Modern Spider Web in the Art Museum

Abstract

In an edited version of the catalog essay for Magdalena Abakanowicz at the Muzeum Narodowyn w Kraków (National Museum), Poland, June 19–August 29, 2010, I open with a discussion of The Round Abakan (1967), the symbolic center of the National Museum exhibition. The viewer can put his/her whole body into “penetrating” the work. The exhibition, like the artist’s other presentations to date—as a whole work in itself, an allegorical construction—is a “Gesamkunstwerk” of sorts. Unlike the modern museum, which establishes a symbolic order, Abakanowicz prompts us to co-establish one. Abakanowicz invites the viewer to dialogue. To negotiate. Her art turns out to disperse the modern frameworks it is normally presented in. Tangled up in the museum like a spider web, her work simultaneously represents and conceals the form it finds itself in.

Keywords:

• Magdalena Abakanowicz
• Abakan
• Spider web
• Gesamkunstwerk Muzeum Narodowyn w Kraków

Acknowledgements

My gratitude goes to Ewa M. Tatar for her help in writing the above text.

Krakow, April 2010

Notes

1. It suffices to recall the important place the Red Abakan (1969) occupied in the world exhibition of feminist art entitled “WALK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” in 2007 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. See: WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, exhibition catalog, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2007.

2. Having in mind post-structuralists such as Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben. See: Rogoff (2008).

3. Iritt Rogoff would no doubt define it as “critical,” situated somewhere between “criticism” and the “critical.” See: Rogoff 2008, 71.

4. For pointing this out and proposing the term, I thank Roman Dziadkiewicz.

5. See: Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier, Stanford (2003).

6. Abakanowicz., Portret..., 27.

7. 33 Ibid., Rozmyślania, “Konteksty. Polska Sztuka Ludowa” 2006, Nos. 3–4, 129.

8. Teorie literatury XX wieku, ed. A. Burzyńska, M.P. Markowski, Krakow (2006), 165, note.

9. Here I refer to the above-mentioned “singular universality”.

10. Here we might mention such artists as: Maria Jarema (1908–1958), Jadwiga Maziarska (1913–2003), or Maria Pinińska-Bereś (1931–1999).

11. In writing “avatar”, I refer to the Hindu concept of the incarnation of a god who descends to Earth, taking the form of a mortal body.

12. I thank Roman Dziadkiewicz for pointing this out.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dominik Kuryłek

DOMINIK KURYLEK

Dominik Kurylek is an art historian, critic, and freelance curator. He is a graduate of art history from Jagiellonian University in Krakow. His doctoral thesis is entitled: On the Modernity’s Margins. Nihilism in Polish Art of the 20th Century. He is interested in neo-avant-garde art and alternative art practice, with special emphasis on artists active in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. While working in the National Museum in Krakow he realized the retrospective exhibition of Magdalena Abakanowicz whose work was an important part of the feminist revolution in Polish art. In the National Gallery of Art Zacheta in Warsaw, together with Joanna Kordiak Piotrowska, he organized a retrospective exhibition of Zbigniew Warepchowski—a pioneer of performance art in Europe. He is a board member of the Razem/Pamoja Foundation, a charity organization that connects people from the “Global South” and “Global North”.

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