Vernissage: 30.11.12 (Friday), 6 PM
One wouldn’t really expect that 34 years after Natalia LL visited New York on a Kościuszko Foundation scholarship there would still be some traces of her visit to be uncovered. In spite of that, in 2011 Karol Radziszewski decided to hit the trail and meet the artists and art dealers she met in 1977. With only a couple of black and white photographs and names of people she met, jotted down while listening to Natalia’s stories, Radziszewski undertook a unique research trip, which became a starting point in the search for parallels between his and Natalia LL’s artistic practice.
The exhibition is the result of these meetings and consists of documentation of the interviews with i.a. Vito Acconci, Carolee Schneemann and Marina Abramović, correspondence with artists and archival photos from the United States. All of this forms a new image of an artist crucial to Polish art history. “America is not ready for this” – the words of Leo Castelli, a famous art dealer and collector, uttered while viewing Natalia’s works, didn’t necessarily discredit her art in the eyes of American spectators. Instead we can think of her visit, during which she both investigated art and tried to define her own artistic position, as the clash of two, completely isolated worlds. On the one hand – the New York bohemian lifestyle, where the cult of the artist ( the white, heterosexual celebrity) still prevailed. On the other – the perspective of a female artist from Europe, specifically from the Soviet Bloc, where people thought that the issue of women’s emancipation has already been solved and normalized within the system. One of the most important works of Natalia LL from 1972 – “Consumer art” belied both of these beliefs. Eating a banana in an erotic way was one thing for Americans, while meaning something completely different to the citizens of the Polish People’s Republic.
The project was developed in collaboration with Residency Unlimited, with the support of the Polish Culture Institute in New York.
The movie is a purchase of MWW Collection within the MKiDN programme “National collections of contemporary art”.
more here: http://muzeumwspolczesne.pl/mww/kalendarium/wystawa/karol-radziszewski-%E2%80%9Eamerica-is-not-ready-for-this/
