KATARZYNA KOBRO ToS 75 - Structutre, 1920 (lost work, photo only)

Transcription

1 KATARZYNA KOBRO ToS 75 - Structutre, 1920 (lost work, photo only) Suspended Construction (1), 1921/1972 (original lost/reconstruction) Suspended Construction (2), / (original lost/reconstruction) Abstract Sculpture (1), 1924 (original, dated hypothetically) Abstract Sculpture (2), 1924/1972 (original lost/reconstruction) Abstract Sculpture (3), 1924/1976 (original lost/reconstruction) Abstract Composition, 1924/1926 (original, titled and dated by the artist) Abstract Composition, 1924/1926 (lost work, photo only) Spatial Sculpture (1), 1925/1967 (partially preserved/partially reconstructed) Spatial Composition (1), 1925 (original, titled and dated by the artist) Spatial Sculpture (2), 1926 (lost work, photo only) Spatial Sculpture (3), 1926 (original, titled and dated hypothetically) Spatial Sculpture, (open provenance, titled and dated hypothetically) Spatial Sculpture, 1928 (open provenance, titled and dated hypothetically) Akt Nude (1), 1925/1927 (original, dated hypothetically) Nude (2), 1925/1927 (original, dated hypothetically) Nude (3), 1925/1927 (original, dated hypothetically) Kompozycja Przestrzenna Spatial Composition (2), 1928 (original, titled and dated by the artist) Spatial Composition (3), 1928 (original, titled and dated by the artist) Spatial Composition (4), 1929 (original, titled and dated by the artist) Spatial Composition (5), 1928 (original, titled and dated by the artist) Spatial Composition (6), 1931 (original, dated hypothetically) Spatial Composition (7), 1931/1973 (original lost/reconstruction) Spatial Composition (8), 1932 (original, monochromatic white coat paint) Design for a functional nursery, (lost work, photo only) Spatial Composition (9), 1933 (original, titled and dated hypothetically) Akt Nude (4), 1931/1933 (lost work, photo only) Nude (5), 1933/1935 (lost work, photo only) Nude (6), 1948 (original) Standing female Nude, 1948 (original) Female Nude, 1948 (original) Girl Nude, 1948 (original)

2 What kind of writing is this? I am tossing the dice into the intentional programme. This writing does not intend to oppose what has already been written on her, because that would be too arrogant. It is, however, an inter-text that erratically tries to bring to light an artistic model that takes the form of two paths of production, instead of just one. This text is a pause to reason why she maintained the concurrent production of two different bodies of work will certainly always remain open. pable of separating her Nudes -- gesture (pulsional nature) -- from her architectural constructions -- speech (production of models from a repertoire of her idea(l)s/thinking). I was very affected by the way her body of work -- as a whole -- exists in two different directions. The presence of two opposing models When Barbara asked me to be part of her Footnote, an was still the same; however, in a totally different form. Now, this new encounter will take the form of a written text, which, I hope, will draw an (in)visible awakening line that (dis)places the locus of her Nudes in the overall production of her different spatial sculptures and compositions. If we are -- following Barthes -- prisoners of both anthropomor- anxiety and it is through anxiety that I will navigate with this suspended piece of writing, because one studies/thinks what one desires/fears. I will concentrate the tracing of this awakening line in the space in between these two heterogeneous, models that Kobro produced, sometimes concomitantly: one being profoundly rational, centered in mathematical operations and mostly assembled from multiple metal parts (a social gestus); and the other one (a private gesture) being the production of undressed ment, of a fetish) explained by the artist as a production that releases sexual tensions located in the body of the producer. The architecture of this text presents the leftovers of her production, situating in it the periods in which she produced her Spatial compositions and she titled her previous work Spatial Sculpture (1). Before that she had titled her work Suspended Constructions. The word construction clearly indi- - the other side of the oval, a rectangular prism. This prism is attached to a metal line, which is also attached to the oval. The Suspended Construction times, is pretty light, because the oval is made with papier-mâché. I had the physical impression that I was literally carrying a mobile). The three The constant oval movement traced by the eye looking up to the object perception expands as it takes in the object within the architecture of the Construction (2), the creation of movement -- an act -- of a metal string is their dialogues with architecture, using the ceiling as a base that deeply reinforces the spatial relations surrounding them. There is no information there instructions as to how far these pieces should be from the walls. her intention of creating a different dialogue with the medium, eliminating any possibility of anthropomorphism, and using new materials and new approaches to how a three-dimensional work can be constructed and dis-

3 played in space. She liberates sculpture from the ground, removing it from its pedestal in order for it to enter -- and later on be penetrated by -- space. spheres; the face has a semi-round shape without any features; the neck is marked by the encounter of two surfaces formed by a rigid line; the arms are extensions of the body; and the belly is formed by an encrusted line that divides the unit in two parts -- upper and lower. In the lower part of Nude (1), we see the legs in the form of two shapes that resemble triangles. It is a very pure and essential way of modeling a sensual female body, where from the encounter of the demarcated shapes emerge essential lineations. The immobility of Nude (1) is released by a rigid line that forms its neck, a precise line in this unity dissolving its static form, provoking ascendent movement in this female body. For Kobro, Sculpting a nude produces physiological or sexual emotions. I sculpt after nature, as one would go to the cinema for a trajectory never ceases. She modeled four nudes at the end actions take a spatial form and what she produces in her nudes is perhaps a self-portrait in erotic positions, where she creates an opening in her body through these solid blocks of plaster. creates a space of instability, where the expenditure of what she gets in one side is what she strips away in the other; where one desire becomes silently co-existing with the opposite other. Spatial Sculpture (1), Spatial Composition (1). In her spatial sculptures and spatial compositions, Kobro created a system of mathematical relations as an act of negation of space -- the so-called emptiness is but a hypothetical absence, a place waiting for an act of creation. Space and time are no longer different categories, but they are coherent dimensions -- in this way all the former limit and frontiers disappear. If for John Cage there is no silence, but only sounds one does not intend, for Kobro there is no empty space, the so-called emptiness is but a hypothetical absence, a place waiting for an act -- of creation. The union of a man and space is the action of man in that space. We come to know space towards sounds culture does not intend. The sounds of an artist that of ourselves. scious is a space in which to release energy, the space for the existence of the sexual drive, where the body needs a certain kind of satisfaction. And this satisfaction is a demand that the organism cannot escape. This drive exists to open a path in our psyche that pressures the body to get this satisfaction. Allowing herself to produce rational experiences separately, together production (and in us now in retrospect) the split that still exists

4 between the utopic and the anthropomorphic. where we are always acted upon. This is what Derrida tried to teach us in his argument of co-existence, where language and culture control individual the nudes, producing an ethical model of affection that deeply exposes vulnerability inside/outside of a discourse of control and detaches her from human motivation to avoid/express anxiety. If paradox is the pathos or the passion of a philosopher in its essence, Kobro, with her two bodies of work produced from contradiction, never claimed the act in her compositions in space (the subject of culture), but -- and as well as -- through an act of negation in the production of her nudes (the subject - geneous system instead of a doxa. What is she trying to tell us with these two modes of production? What kind of a space do we think might exist in between these two divergent modes of production? She did not repress her desire for discharge, and in not repressing it, she presented us with a blind spot in our culture that cannot yet be fully articulated by her action If we can imagine that it is possible to encounter in the tra- these double paradoxical histories -- maybe -- coincide and collide, perhaps this piece should be Spatial Composition (9) -- her last piece from her compositions series, made in modeled in a metal shape of two colors: white and bluish gray. The encounter of these two parallel and solitary paths introjects a relational necessity, with the beholder transforming the experience of the one who observes the work. The surface of SC (9) has neither an inside nor an outside space; the beholder is the one that has to complete the open gestalt. SC (9) presents to us, as beholders, the corporal form within a non-human material with an open -- a suspended act in time and space -- an action far beyond her time. The invisible event of what happens -- in between these two parallel models -- is the action she leaves open to us. Far removed from transcendence, Kobro shows in this double twisted method a topology of immanence where we frees herself/oneself from the imperative categories around her/our time ourselves as to whether there is any chance to create a sexuality that is not time (and culture). - of work is an open proposition that escapes any narrative that can suffocate our ability to risk new writings/readings/modes of existence.

5 Floating footnotes: Poland. It was a chance encounter that can also be called an act of solidarity. One day, between her and Nicolás. gestus into a private one, exposing what cannot be readable; a text that extrapolates its meaning while going in two opposite directions at the same time. It is a text that negates in between words inscribed by the artist /writer/reader where she/he needs to constantly produce/absorb a corpus (an it) that can be experienced as an invisible joy, a surplus, an excess.