Oskar Dawicki
Window for Smokers – Prototype
Oskar Dawicki
Window for Smokers – Prototype, 2007, installation, wood, acrylic glass, felt, 125 × 87 cm
Collection II of the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok. Work donated to the Arsenal Gallery by the artist

The Window for Smokers was initially an element of Oskar Dawicki’s exhibition Furnishing the trap-apartment shown at Galeria Arsenał in Białystok in 2007. Dawicki created there an interior whose absurd arrangement and character went entirely against the common perceptions of functionality. Dawicki furnished this space mainly with works he had created for other projects. This truly surrealistic interior contained the vaseline-covered Undrying Painting, canvases covered with the fungus Myrothecium verrucaria cultivated by the artist, the picture Panorama reduced to the bare frame and the printout entitled The Invocation containing the invocation from Pan Tadeusz printed in a font having no Polish diacritics. The TV-set showed the video Home Shopping, with Dawicki as the salesman and a work by Rafał Bujnowski as goods offered at a bargain price.
The fact that Dawicki arranged an interior using his own works indicates that Furnishing the trap-apartment should be situated in the broader group of works in which he focuses on himself. Among those is the Master’s Thesis* of which he was the subject, the writing of which he had anonymously commissioned on the web. The project shown at the Arsenał Gallery refers to problems arising from “being an artist”, linked with the art market and art institutions, with everyday functioning in the real world, and above all with creating art and living within its domain. Symptomatically, the objects used therein entirely appropriate the space in which they are situated, removing the creator/owner from it, while themselves they remain suspended in the space between art (that is, being an artwork) and object (being a piece of furniture).
The designer Window for Smokers consists of three elements: an insulated opening in the glass, through which a smoker may extend the cigarette-holding arm, a triangular opening serving as the mouthpiece, and the ashtray attached on the outer side of the window frame, conveniently for shaking ash into it. The arrangement makes it possible to smoke outside without having to leave the interior. The prototype seems to owe much to the attitude of the artist (who is himself, in fact, a smoker), who looks at both the world of things and the world of art with a generous dose of humour and a fine perception of absurdity and irony.
Izabela Kopania
translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz
* Work in the Collection II of the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok.

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