Dishing

The object Dishing belongs to a group of several artworks bearing the same title produced by Zbigniew Warpechowski over the period of twenty years ago. The first of them was shown in the Krzysztofory Gallery in Cracow in 1971. In one of its exhibition rooms, Warpechowski divided the floor with white lines into a hundred squares and in each of them he placed a white ceramic plate accompanied by a caption and symbolically loaded props (for instance, a plate with two slices of bread was captioned “HOME”). This installation was also shown at the Art Festival in Edinburgh (Atelier 77 Gallery, 1972) with the action of selling the plates used in the work as the accompanying event. The artist declared that in subsequent years, his explorations would focus on the plates/notions that failed to sell, that is those that would prove the least susceptible to the mechanisms of the market.

Warpechowski returned to Dishing in the early 1990s. He produced a series of black square boxes divided into four compartments, in which he placed plates or their fragments, occasionally with some other objects. The composition in each compartment was given a caption, for instance, as in the work now in the collection of Galeria Arsenał in Białystok, “DIALECTICS”, “OPENINGS”, “LOWR THINGS” (sic!) / HIGHER THINGS”, “CONTRADICTIONS”.

The Dishing installation and objects originate from the experience of concrete poetry, from a sensitivity to words and the meanings ascribed to them. Warpechowski constructs enigmatic connections between the universe of things and the universe of language. The lexicon proves insufficient with regards to those actions; he creates neologisms that have the power of naming gestures and processes. Dishing, as he wrote in the related manifesto, means dividing into portions, portioning the organism’s hunger, the material, notional and artistic reality. Constellations of words and things created by Warpechowski seem to refer to the subconscious strata and to reveal new meanings in irrational juxtapositions and rifts opening in the combinations of names and designates. The critical potential of these actions has an aspect of protest – not only against social phenomena (such as consumerism or the political control over knowledge and information), but also against the schematic perception of reality. The roots of this protest must be sought in Warpechowski’s position: a radical conjoining of art and life, and a constant questioning of the manifestations of the world that surrounds him.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz