Energy Communication in Józef Robakowski’s Films and Videos

The artists associated with the new, pragmatic Neo-Avant-Garde tendencies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Robakowski among them, investigated how meanings, ideas, different kinds of artistic worlds and definitions of art are merely functions of matter, writing and the relativism of linguistic or discursive manipulation, and no longer point towards any essential reality. They examined how these things become functions of the particular medium and context in which they arise; of an evolving world and changing humanity; and of transformations in science, technology and communication connected with the birth of globalisation or, more generally, with the so-called “civilisational acceleration” observed in Poland during the 1970s. Abandoning categories such as neutrality and autonomy, the artists of pragmatic Conceptualism sought consciously and actively to participate in these transformations of extra-artistic reality while maintaining the specificity of their own artistic context.

For the first time in the history of Polish art, the Neo-Avant-Garde of the 1970s proposed treating — and defining — art as an entirely secular phenomenon, understanding it in profane terms stripped of metaphysical assumptions. This was particularly important given the absence of a Dadaist tradition in Poland. It was the Neo-Avant-Garde artists of the 1970s who first introduced elements of that tradition into Polish artistic life. They represented a significant novelty (whereas essentialist Conceptualism belonged to an idealist tradition quite characteristic of Polish culture). Attention shifted towards artistic discursive operations — institutional and milieu-based — that supplemented and extended the operations on the discourse of art so prevalent in essentialism, leading to the creation and promotion of new, contextual artistic qualities. While the discursive operations that emerged within essentialism were limited to transforming the discourse of art, the pragmatists transformed that discourse simultaneously with interventions in, and attempts to transform, other extra-artistic discourses: those of science, politics, cinema and design, for example, as well as the institutional discourse of art, which essentialists regarded as extra-artistic.

The Neo-Avant-Garde was dominated by doubt about the inquiry into the meaning of the concept of art that had been constitutive of essentialist Conceptualism; artists stopped searching for the “impossible”. The institutional and discursive definition of artistic facts, together with the awareness that art lacked an aura — the extraordinary atmosphere of mystery always associated with it, or rather with essentialist thinking — left a significant sense of dissatisfaction. On the one hand, Robakowski celebrates art’s lack of aura, the absence of mystery, sanctity or a metaphysical thrill in encounters with new, progressive artistic activity. On the other, he attempts to restore these qualities within art’s new, secularised — or rather desacralised — context. This becomes possible through Robakowski’s strategy of energy communication: his vitalism and biologism as a means of direct artistic communication beyond the constraints of excessively rationalised discourse.

In analysing his interest in art’s energetic potential, Robakowski frequently referred to Andrzej Pawłowski’s artistic strategy and his definition of the territory of art as an “energy field”. Pawłowski wrote: “Creative work is the pleasure of producing a certain kind of energy, of carrying and emanating it (…) Energy corresponds to the former concept of the work of art, whose principal task is energetic transmission.” According to Pawłowski, a viewer inspired by this “energetic transmission” may, now as a creator, amplify it by producing their own field of energy. Józef Robakowski’s films, and especially his videos — particularly those using light — also appear to develop this kind of energetic dialogue.

In the 1970s, when he was already active in the Workshop of the Film Form, the artist made numerous films whose principal purpose was to initiate “energy transmissions”, mainly through light (Test, Attempt II) but also through the monotonous repetition of a predetermined score (Market Square, Record). To a considerable extent, these films were inspired by the traditions of Polish and Russian Constructivism of the 1920s and 1930s, which exerted a powerful influence on the Workshop of the Film Form. During this period Robakowski frequently referred to the writings of Władysław Strzemiński and Kazimir Malevich. Malevich is especially relevant here: he believed that art should express pure, non-objective feelings and desires not subordinated to the realities of practical life. Such feelings granted access to “being as such” — an absolute that Malevich understood as a “pan-energetic universe”. Robakowski’s works with light appear to reconcile Malevich’s radical “energetic” iconoclasm with Strzemiński’s central demand that a work of art be reduced to its fundamental structural determinants.

Test (1971) is one such film. In the spirit of Strzemiński, it analyses the medium of cinema, presenting it as an apparatus of light; in the spirit of Pawłowski and Malevich, it also initiates a particular “physiological-energetic dialogue” between work and viewer. Made without a camera, the film was created by Robakowski punching dozens of differently sized holes into opaque film stock. During projection, this construction allows the film to “transmit” the strong, unmediated light of the projector lamp, which “attacks” the viewer and in a sense “records itself” on the retina. Beginning in 1973 (Workshop Action, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź), Robakowski would often stand facing the audience with a mirror during screenings and reflect “streams of projector light” — passing through the film’s “holes” — towards the viewers. During one such performance at the 1974 Knokke-Heist festival, a genuine “battle of light” ensued when the audience answered Robakowski’s “attack” with camera flashes. This situation best reveals the work’s structural orientation towards activating the viewer, provoking a response and initiating physiological-energetic transmissions between work and audience.

In Attempt II, Robakowski explores the relationship between the film’s visual layer — an intense red — and its soundtrack of classical organ music. The artist separates the two and presents them alternately, denying the viewer the satisfaction usually derived from their synchronous reception. The work is also constructed around counterpoint, and its “principal subject” is the energising power of the sudden appearance of bright red light. In the 1990s, now using video, Robakowski made many works intended to initiate energy transmission. The most radical appear to be the Impulsators, whose message is addressed to the viewer’s body and has powerfully energetic and erotic dimensions. Like Test, this film initiates a particular erotic contact between the “corporeality of the medium” and the “corporeality of the viewer”. These two materialities enter into dialogue and interfere with one another. A process occurs — described by Anne Michelson — in which “cinematic desire” is transferred from the human body present on screen, within the layer of filmic representation (as in traditional cinema), onto the “body” of the film itself, towards contemplation of its materiality and physicality. Robakowski intensifies this process through a series of pulsations, flickers and other assaults of sound and light. Such devices ensure that, during the projection of these films, the viewer’s body and the film’s body remain in continuous, almost sexual contact. In this context, the Impulsators develop not only Test but also the Bio-Mechanical Recordings, an artistic strategy Robakowski pursued during the 1970s.

1, 2, 3, 4… (1992) and Energy Angles (1994), in turn, represent an attempt to move beyond the iconoclastic works with light described above and supplement them with representational elements. In 1, 2, 3, 4…, the reluctance to saturate the work with personal subjectivity — closely connected to Robakowski’s analytical position — is relaxed, as the artist places his own image within the film’s structure. His likeness appears in brief flashes of light lasting fractions of a second. This use of light recalls the process by which a photographic representation is made: the film stock is exposed in a “flash” to the appearances of reality. In Energy Angles, we see perforated film stock moving steadily, with a longitudinal line scratched along its entire length. The projector lamp shines through the film. Robakowski was then fascinated by the energetic potential of the geometric figure of the angle. The line the artist “draws” forms nothing but angles and the tensions and struggles of forces they generate.