Library

The concrete elements making up Mikołaj Smoczyński’s Library once comprised a different stand-alone sculpture. They were re-used by the artist along with all of the connotational baggage that they bore. This was not the first time that Smoczyński employed such an approach. His Double Object (1980), one of the breakthrough works in the artist’s career, was composed of canvases and frames from existing paintings. In Smoczyński’s commentary on Library, the artist underscores the significance of using pre-existing materials and their importance to the semantic aspect of the work: “… a library is a collection of various thoughts, but what it ultimately stands for is a new quality, something completely different, though arising from the meanings associated with its primary elements.”*

Library arose from concrete modules which Smoczyński showed in all of their severity and simplicity. The focus on the specificity of the material, so characteristic of the artist’s works, serves here to reveal its immanent properties. Smoczyński always approached his raw materials with humility and his becoming familiar with them was like discovering a primordial matter. Displaying the characteristics of the material, showing it in its raw state, was a way to tap its symbolic potential. The material’s verity was meant to unveil its metaphysical dimension; focusing on the matter’s corporeality was to reveal its meanings (and, consequently, those of the object). In this context the process of creating and working with concrete, insulating board or plywood was not only an artistic gesture for Smoczyński but also an ethical one.

The artist was equally distant from the idea of perceiving a library as a universal collection of knowledge as he was from the need to follow the mechanisms governing the process through which it is amassed. His work on form and matter involved learning about a place, his own body and its relationship with the space it occupied. A library, i.e. a book collection, which is premised on the fact that it should expand, was a capacious metaphor for functioning within a space and building objects that are an alternative to existing ones, both in the physical and symbolic sense.

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*  M. Smoczyński, Czas przeszły. Komentarze do prac zrealizowanych w latach 1980–1999 [Past Time. Commentary on Works from 1980–1999], quoted after: Mikołaj Smoczyński. Retrospektywnie [Mikołaj Smoczyński in Retrospect], ed. M. Lachowski, Lublin 2011, p. 152.