RED SHOPPING BAG ON A STICK

The objects Untitled (from the Hats and Containers series, in progress since 2010) and Red Shopping Bag on a Stick must be considered in the broader context of artistic strategies adopted by the Blue Republic group. One of these strategies is based on collecting – gathering substances and things. The artists include into their collection both found objects and objects they had made themselves, which often have no clear purpose and which are, to paraphrase the “art for art’s sake” formula, “things for things’ sake”. These include a “flag” fashioned from a red plastic shopping bag stuck on a stick. The Blue Republic artists bring these objects into gallery spaces, into exhibitions; they show them among other objects, in ever-new constellations. During exhibitions at the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok and the BWA in Zielona Góra (2017), they juxtaposed them with finds from various nooks and crannies of both institutions. Objects that once served their function became objets trouvés for a moment, ready-mades ready to be used as works of art.

Reviewers of Blue Republic’s work see an affinity between their practice and the strategy applied by Kurt Schwitters, whose concept of creating from random materials culminated in Merzbau. Actions undertaken by Blue Republic are also clearly inspired by a social science perspective, a material turn, the agency of things and the concept of their social biography.

Let us look at a Canadian Army helmet from the First World War from this perspective. Its original history remains in the realm of speculation made possible by the object’s obvious purpose and the signs of wear and tear. The gesture of drawing lines similar to the seams of the skull on the helmet’s surface made it possible to construct new associations around it. The helmet first had the status of a found object, then an object in the artists’ collections, and finally a work in the Arsenal Gallery’s collection. At each of these stages it functioned in the context of other things, which, depending on their configuration, fostered the search for its new meanings. In the case of the Białystok and Zielona Góra exhibitions, installations made of things were interpreted through the lens of dystopia and the dehumanised landscape of a contemporary city, the worsening social alienation and, ultimately, the collapse of civilisation.

Blue Republic installations meet the definition of bricolage. “The bricoleur’s job begins with an inventory, checking the availability of objects with intent to initiate a type of dialogue with the material, said dialogue yielding a new whole. While created with the use of ‘remnants and debris’, it should – within the framework of what it comprises – embrace all potential responses and configurations.”^[1]

In the case of both exhibitions[2], the artists assume a modus operandi of careful observation of the immediate environment – the gallery, a world in and of itself – as they access and explore the institutional spaces inaccessible to others, finding a great variety of objects, useful or not, forgotten or reused, abandoned or owned. But this is not the activity of collectors or hoarders. An institution – especially one in which office, exhibition, and technical space is combined – will accumulate objects throughout its operations. Blue Republic awards the selected objects a new transitory status. In a concurrent action, the artists confront these objects with elements from their personal collection of ready-mades, brought to the gallery for the purpose of exhibition and introduced as a kind of bridge between the original object, the collector’s item, and garbage found in the corner of a room, for instance. Once juxtaposed, both objects acquire equal status – a century-old helmet and a plastic bag are both elevated to the rank of being “objets d’art.” One can easily discern a semblance to Kurt Schwitters’ constructions, but whereas Schwitters appropriated architectural tropes with the intent to graft them onto his own interior spaces, Blue Republic operates at a time when institutions, while functioning as public spaces, may also become private spaces, of sorts, when artists are provided the opportunity to create a work in situ within the institution. “Schwitters ‘the garbage man’ is also a collector, whose activity – involving a procedure of searching, collecting, and organising – is a creative process leading directly to the conception of something new and original, an artwork. […]. Consequently, two moments bear emphasising in the work of an artist-collector: his/her activities in the social and cultural, and the related distinct division of reality into two areas: the public (the artist’s object-hunting ground) and the private (the artist’s shelter).”^[3] In this sense, these Blue Republic works are a form of institutional critique, an exploration of institutional innards, the areas of the gallery concealing “treasures unknown,” a penetration of the inner sanctums, in which the veiled, depreciated, and seemingly unimportant still function as crucial components and justifications for the institution’s existence. The artists’ examinations lead to exposure, and to exposing the unexposed – and in case of the two exhibitions, employ diverse methodologies in doing so. Eschewing the inclusion of didactic commentaries on the origin of the objects chosen, the artists allow the viewer’s perspicacity to prevail. […]

Continual creation and disappearance, expansion and contraction, organised structure and chaotic disintegration interpenetrate and remain key elements in Blue Republic’s work. Viewers may perceive the artists sacralising appropriated space, making votive offerings to secular gods of uncertainty, entropy, and inequality, rather than simply exhibiting collections of works. […] In elevating low-ranking objects and waste to “objet d’art,” artists have become donors of the immeasurable. Today, when accessibility and openness of gallery space is emphasised alongside the need to annihilate barriers between institution and public, the thesis of sanctifying exhibition venues seems risky, to say the least. Yet, Blue Republic extracts fragments of the everyday, transmuting them into entirely different entities. Once the definition of the sacralisation becomes analogous to deprofanisation, such artistic activities assume the discernible hues of entreaty.

An excerpt from the essay ‘Physical Inventory’ by Wojciech Kozłowski, published in the exhibitions catalogue BLUE REPUBLIC. Made in Blue Republic, Galeria Arsenał, Białystok 2018

[1] B. Frydryczak, Świat jako kolekcja [The World as Collection], Poznań 2002.

[2] Blue Republic, Made in Blue Republic, collaborative project of the BWA Zielona Góra, Poland (on view: 10.03–2.04.2017) and the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, Poland (on view: 17.03–4.05.2017) – editor’s note.

[3] Op. cit.