DUDEK-DÜRER

Lidia WISNIEWSKA

ANDRZEJ DUDEK-DÜRER'S JOURNEYES IN TIME AND SPACE

"Andrzej Dudek-Dürer" denotes: someone who being a creator living in a defined time and space wants at the same time to go beyond the concrete. In this sense, after all, maybe, such a name would be for him, as for a human being, even too narrow. Assuming a reincarnation model as the basis of shaping and describing his experience, he is inclined to claim to carry inside him also consciousness of other people, other than the one confirmed in the double surname: for example consciousness of a Hindu - which would provide explanation for his interest in philosophy of the East and meditation techniques, for construction of musical instruments with his own hands (series of sitars), which although he has not encountered in his current experience, however, he practically resolved problems of their construction. Above all, however, Andrzej Dudek demands treating him as a contemporary embodiment of Dürer. Most certainly it is a dangerous thing to claim: "I am embodiment of the most prominent representative of German Renaissance." Or to exclaim with wreath: "Some lunatic damaged my picture in Pinakoteca." Dangerous - as this evokes suspicion that somebody wants to appropriate something, which he did not make or do and to become somebody that he cannot be. However, since he can build a sitar, although he plays it undoubtedly more like a man of the West than of the East, he also can use the artistic output of the artist born in the second half of the 15th century in such a way, which evokes reflection, then, maybe, it is worthwhile to treat those declarations, if not literally, then figuratively, but one way or the other as an expression of a deep affinity with the stance of that artist, reticent and full of reserve and at the same time demanding acknowledgement of his worth, lofty and refined , posing solidly for his self-portrait and at the same time a man full of great inner anxiety and obsessions. This connection reveals itself starting from exposing of monogram of that German creator, identified with his own, through creation of his own juvenile portraits after the well known self-portraits of the Renaissance artist in such a manner that there is extricated some resemblance of the facial features, as far as reaching for motifs from Dürer's works, which become so indispensable in expressing certain problems, as if they were his own.

This double name does not hide however the concrete, whose name is Andrzej Dudek, who was born in the second part of the 20th century, lives permanently in Poland, but, undoubtedly, was affected by the spring breezes of influences of new cultural movements of the 60's in the world, including a fascination, so characteristic of them, in the philosophies of the East, search for alternative ways of living (among which travelling found its place) and alternative states of mind (which is expressed by accentuation of his "metaphysical-telepathic activity"). Expressing it in the most general terms, those movements brought about impairment of some values of the ordered existence, directed at accumulation of material goods and an individualized model of life, emphasising originality and novelty, and in consequence also exclusive ownership of rights, and also - more broadly - they brought impairment of isolationist conceptions as far as placement of a human being in the universe goes. Therefore, in turn Andrzej Dudek is not the man dressed with fantasy in fashionable clothes and elegant thin leather gloves from Dürer's self-portrait of e.g. 1498 (he then might be to close to the image of a bourgeois of 1968, who, as the matter of fact could not be encountered in Poland in that time). It is not certain if his long hair or growth originate from the said portrait, or from the hippie conventions, it is however rather certain that rather from the second ones originate that wearing of heavily worn-out, already full of holes, warm jacket from a military warehouses, trousers composed of layers of patches laid on top of one another and shoes having been continuously reconstructed in a similar manner. Finally then the thing that differentiate him from the German artist could be called a living sculpture, and that what differs them and connects at the same time - Andrzej Dudek-Dürer.

In any case, presence of culturally heterogeneous elements which can be noticed in his artistic biography can be explained not only thanks to journeys in time, this being preferred by him (independent of whether we will treat it as a fact, metaphor or something in between), but also thanks to journeys in space (again: no matter whether we would look for their origin in renaissance biography or in contra-cultural model). This means also mental journeys, and not only telepathic ones but also the ones being carried out by means of artistic ideas realised through mail-art, thanks to which he sets up an extended network of connections with artists all over the world (indeed the international company participated e.g. in his subsequent projects of celebrating birthday of Albrecht Dürer in the eighties) and it also means journeys performed physically and covering equally extensive part of the globe: it would probably be a worthless exercise to try and list all routes in details since they run both through Asia, and Australia, North and Central America, and of course through European countries, so let us go no further into this matter by saying that not through Antarctica yet, but this is an area probably unnecessary in this collection. This means that his works are in public and private collections in such various places as Canada, Mexico, Korea, USA, Switzerland, Uruguay Israel or Japan. But it means mainly personal contact with considerably various cultures, various people, various situations. The feeling of world differentiation becomes in this way a basic experience. And thus this experience becomes the (internal) space unifying the variety.

However, “Andrzej Dudek-Dürer” is also a name-identification not only of a creator – but also of a concrete piece of work, being now and here, which has already existed, and also occasionally existing somewhere else. Because as a creator he undertakes also transforming himself into a work, which may sound not less paradoxical than the statement that he is Dürer. Although in traditional understanding a work comprises a record of somebody’s else activity, nevertheless finally this is an object: composition, picture, sculpture, play, etc. The artistic object is in this way separated from the man i.e. from the subject: although name of the latter, apart from the title, determines its identification. It does not mean that Andrzej Dudek-Dürer does not create works just as the ones above, however even they will significantly display features of meaningful ambiguity resulting on the other hand from references to somebody else's works – individual or un-individualised works derived e.g. from mass culture, but this issue will be raised later. It means, however – as we concluded earlier – his crossing the personality-personality border, thus aiming at something which could be called trans-personality, and now we ascertain his aiming at crossing the border between that which is a persona and that which is not. Unless we assume that a persona is after all not only body and mind – but also e.g. clothes, thus things as well. But such an assumption would be, however, a certain misuse: since even a naked man does not loose his identity. And the clothes themselves are taken into consideration here constituting a “living sculpture”. Although actually, the said artist introduces also the term “art of body” or “art of hair”: sometimes he uses the latter in his compositions; he also follows certain feeding rigours somehow affecting his body. However, he does not go as far as those creators who e.g. through plastic operations experiment with their faces or those who experiment with their death – in essence in a very verbatim way “sculpturing” themselves. To some extent, of course, the artist being presented here may experiment in this way with his body wearing shoes of weight exceeding all standards – excluding maybe those that describe weight of stocks or manacles or similar tools of constraint and torture. However, in fact, the problem he raises in this way is the problem of the relation between object and subject.

It could be assumed that the basic difference between Andrzej Dudek and Albrecht Dürer in this area consists in the idea that for the latter clothes played an ancillary role: smart, fantastic, distinguished clothes do not reveal, obviously, any signs of damage. And in the former they become to gain independence. Among this continuous fluctuation of the existence here are the shoes – having been constantly glued, thickened with subsequent layers of leather-imitation stripes – they assume a monstrous appearance but they are a testimony of specific life of the thing; of life, besides, granted by the creator who defends them from non-existence. One does not know whether there is still in them any element which has not been replaced during their thirty-year life, but in spite of this, or maybe thanks to this – their paradoxical identity is preserved (in no way less intriguing than identity of a living organism, which also during its existence replaces nearly all of its components). This para-life of shoes offers them characteristics of a child, who requires continuous attendance and with respect to whom you do not know whether it will ever become independent; while in the meantime it parasites on its creator who plays a role of the wall in a gallery, an actor exposing his accessories, briefly speaking of a carrier of something which – making it a living sculpture – simultaneously objectifies it. As even an artistic subject remains a subject. And it is probably here where this less attractive, rather degrading part of crossing the borders, is revealed, which – in case they are crossed in direction of the “master’s” identity - was extremely promising. But this crossing may become attractive again in another area of activity. For example, when the artist - not feeling hampered by dissimilarity of media – equally willingly makes use of music, plastic means, video and para-theatre means (performance). And this is just what happens in the case of Andrzej Dudek-Dürer. And this may be so because actually everywhere similar endeavours – of maintenance and transformation – can be used.

This problem of co-existence and competition of maintenance and changing, which may be reduced here to the problem of mimesis i.e. imitation, is certainly one of the most elementary issues connected with this creation. This is the matter of stability, which , however, cannot get rid of a change (otherwise it is dead – as a replica) and a change which cannot get rid of its solid base (which must be existing at least as a negative – as it was emphasised once in linguistics by Hjelmslev). That is why Andrzej Dudek by creating his “Dürer”-like portraits simultaneously introduces his anti-Dürer shoes. Because he must preserve a difficult balance: imitating the artist living five centuries ago (even assuming that - imitating himself living five centuries ago) he cannot forget his current awareness, situation or identity of the twenty century artist. But at the same time introducing his anti-Dürer “sculpturing” (or – with no offence – “patching”, being a symbol of fight against decomposition) of himself does not cease to emphasise similarities. In this way he maintains an unstable balance of both accepting and negating – this Verwindung of Heidegger, treated by Giano Vattimo as an indication of postmodernism. And maybe this qualification is very much adequate here. Since, regardless of diverse understandings of this term, postmodernism has always shown certain unity internally not-homogeneous, complicated, and also to some extent constituting a micro world.

And it is just now when the question of relation to his own work and other works that he reaches for must be raised. With the highest intensification he reaches for those which were created by – let us say it in this way – his namesake in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Although he knows them by autopsy, obviously it is not the originals which are the point of start-up for his activities: but Dürer must first go through a filter of, by any means, a modern technique of copying and it should get to the contemporary recipient in the form of a reproduction. Therefore, even if we could not to refer yet to the originals as “subject of art” – we certainly can do so to the latter. Anyway, the originals (for obvious reasons) could not be the subject of further processing – even if the artist justified his rights in the way Andrzej does. Regardless, however, of how this is justified, it is a fact that the original signed by the artist, who undoubtedly was aware of his individuality, is hanging in the museum. Individual work was replaced by the outcome of mass culture, similarly to – please forgive me this comparison – a shoe made by a shoemaker was replaced by the factory made product. Obviously, there is a basic difference appearing here that the shoe had a – as primary one – utility function before it was degraded by the artistic one thanks to Andrzej Dudek-Dürer, which finally suspended the subject on the border between two areas: it still fulfils its utility function but in a fairly grotesque or in any case constrained way, while it fulfils its aesthetic function in an extended way: verbatim i.e. as a piece of work and only as an element of presentation in the work of art understood in a more traditional sense. Hence it undergoes the three-stage evolution – the subject transformed individually into an aesthetic one – subject shown in the work (not quite the same as in van Gogh's, but also not quite without any allusion to it). The Dürer’s work undergoes, in the hands of his successor, somehow a reverse evolution: work of art (individual) – product of mass culture (reproduction) and finally – work of art marked somehow by the impress of reproduction and thus – which should be consequently stated – not so much individual but transpersonal or – to use a literary term: “intertextual” (depending on whether we will acknowledge that this transgression occurs inside Andrzej Dudek-Dürer or between the works of Andrzej Dudek as an artist and the work from the last centuries.

These relations have various degree of intensity in individual works of the artist presented here. There are such that could be regarded as close to repeating. This happens with the characteristic monogram of Albrecht Dürer, which on many prints of the contemporary artist appears as if verbatim although it may be perceived ambiguously. Sometimes it is transformed from the sign of identification into a large composition e.g. a set-up stones placed in nature – as it was done in 1997 at the festival of art in Korea (where N.B. initial letters of the two names unexpectedly coincided in* similarity with the Korean word meaning end so the work got a title “Copyright by End”). Sometimes the interference is grounded e.g. only on introducing a different colour as a background for an engraving of the German artist (Seven... heads... space..., serigraphy from 1986). Sometimes we are to do with minor transformations of his prints (such as subsequent cracking: double, fourfold, multiple: specific aesthetic apocalypse of Dürer’s Apocalypse – in Apocalypse 4... 5... 8... from 1978). However, most often Dürer’s motives enter into more sophisticated relations – with each other or with elements introduced by the contemporary artist, with this sophistication being even more significant due to the fact that these works occur in series.

The Last Timespace (the titles due to mobility of the artist are typically formulated - sometimes ambiguously – in the twentieth century Latin language) constitutes a series like this. “The Last Timespace” introduces two associations with Dürer with The Last Supper and Four Riders of Apocalypse. Motifs of these both works undergo here transformation both with respect to techniques (fuzziness of drawing characteristics in the first case and clear graphic properties in the second) and meaning: individual end of Christ is also the beginning of Christianity; however, the Apocalypse – the end of human race – is also beginning of the Kingdom of Heaven. The end of God in the human time-space and beginning of the new course of humanity, end of Earth and life of the just in God’s time-space – this collision is possible to achieve thanks to reference only to the two somebody else's works. The second work goes in the direction of deducting – there is a table without human beings, a rider without a horse: The Last Supper and the Apocalypse being crippled – they turn out to be customised, deprived of their messages. The third work repeats the first state and at the same time the primary collision is placed on an indifferent background: it is a packing paper with repeating banal pattern of small roses. In this way, by adding this element of twentieth century daily life to basic metaphysical questions raised by the artist living five centuries ago another tension is delineated. In another serigraphs the blood-red lace of hardly perceptible outline of Apocalypse riders is laid on the white lace and the model's body emanating with eroticism promoting (this text will also be appropriated to the work by Andrzej Dudek-Dürer) “ganz schon romantisch – Luwa pretty fashion”. On the other hand in the Apocalypse of the Polyworld (1982) the background is a political map of the world: picture of the Earth's concrete in the eighties (beginning of political changes, breakdown of a certain system) divided into colours on which the network of lines from Dürer’s Apocalypse is laid – of a certain kind of archetype of destruction: here neither archetype elements fit in the concrete nor concrete (colours) fully fills in the outlined individual. As you can see, the messages may appear here differentiated. One thing is here unavoidable: combining (in the way having something to do with collage) materials of different nature e.g. artistic prints and packing paper or glossy ads and motifs of various nature (e.g. from the Bible and daily life, past and present). This combination of different things, at the same time taking them out from the context appropriate for them, which at some time was the reality, life and crations of Dürer, becomes a characteristic method of actions of the artist, allowing him to cover the world from the perspective of almost algebraic transformations (addition, deduction, multiplication in series, division in versions) describing reality as a game of differentiated forces.

With reference to this, it is characteristic that he continuously moves in the area of concepts or phenomena, which are constantly elementary. Motifs of life and death, a woman (eroticism) and a man, space and time, concrete and abstract, as well as the world and “I” – determine his perception. For example we find a specific credo in The Space of Life. The frames outline here the area of a square; in its centre there is a multiplied square which simultaneously seems to direct attention inwards and upwards (the outline of Mexican pyramid from bird’s eye view was used here): vertical and horizontal, centre and infinity, centralizing and decentralizing features, depth and height – they supplement each other in a regular, coolly geometrical and abstract shape. And further: the surface has been tidied up by gradual decomposition of colour from brown to red (on which the pyramid-labyrinth is fixed) up to gentle blue. But an atomised and at the same time chaotic haze appears around the central figure. On the other hand, from the corner of the big square to the front – the rider from Dürer’s Apocalypse jumps out. In this way, the cool and sophisticated geometric structure is associated with the non-structural, in the place where it appears, but warm colour whose gradual transfer in farther areas structurise, however, the whole surface of the big square (where the complications of the small one do not reach). Further on, the haze around the tidied up kernel of the reality corresponds to a simple message of the rider – emerging from almost a margin of existence. This is a complex definition of life describing its dynamics: colour and line, point and figure, abstraction and concrete, structure and formlessness.

Sometimes the shoes enter into the dynamics – obviously those special ones, constituting the “living sculpture” of Andrzej Dudek-Dürer – but now reduced to traditional role of the presentation element. In May I use (1991) they appear next to the motif of the rider (from The Four Riders of Apocalypse) on the background of the colour transferring from heavy brown through red to pale blue. The symbol of daily life becomes here ambiguous and abstract. Linked with the rider it reminds of suspension between reconstruction and destruction, between existence and non-existence; being cold as if made from metal sheet they suggest, however, an organic male form; set together with soles – resembling an arrow directed upwards – but their perceptible weight holds them tight to the ground.

This presence of the rider having been continuously emphasised so far does not mean, however, that in the case of the artist in subject we are to do with gloomy and one-sided imagination, filled solely with images of destruction. Already in the described prints the shoes mentioned introduced erotic contents: in other serigraphs they are associated with Dürer’s female nudes. Anyway, we can generally leave the area of Dürer’s repercussions altogether. Dynamization of the presented world is maintained also when we come to elements not marked with aesthetic origin.

In Everytime ... you leave Space there is a man’s palm with fingers wide apart and a woman’s mouth (so in both cases a portion represents the whole and – let us add something concrete – pulls the symbolic with it). Each of the fingers has its specific features: slightly bent thumb is aggressively conquering, like a comics superman, the forefinger assumes an almost defending position: it is slightly bent, as if evading: the middle, the central finger seems to express acceptance and acquires harmony; the ring one remains resistant, independent, in spite of marriage of convenience; the little one turns out to be passive and helpless. Each of them corresponds with individuality of lips – the first ones directed less to it and more to the spectator, touching it only in the corner; the second ones – perpendicular, embracing, absorbing; the third ones – resembling a small flame – more spiritual than physical; the fourth ones – steel cold, selfish; the fifth ones – resembling a biological form, a worm. That is how we come back to the possibilities noticed before: contradictory forces and their versions; antagonism and supplementation of each other. The concrete of hands and mouth starts to function as an abstract model of differentiated erotic behaviours. And erotic behaviours – as a model of common dynamics, revealed in variety (variants) and unity (variants of the one), relation (opposition) and breakdown (of the same e.g. fingers of one palm). Besides, in a similarly valied way it can be accessed also from the side of abstraction such as the one presented e.g. by cycles: Sometimes (network of lines resembling branches of neurones, branching in all directions) or Nothing (single colours or several of them in rainbow-like distribution).

Therefore, let us repeat once again: in this artistic production there appear basic questions and complex replies. The replies, which present more of a process of emerging from the truth than give a clear solution, meaning: recommendation. Processability is the consequence of continuous situating and locating the art “between”: between various times, spaces, personalities, cultures. As a result there appear the constructions – such as characters, as well as works, which are ambiguous, and paradoxically – fleeing easy evaluation. Certainly on one side it is a artistic production which attracts by extension of the horizons, on the other side – it reveals traps. The choice of the given kind of totality of experience is also a choice – and there is still left something beyond it.

So on one side there is the art – or rather artistic production – aimed at covering everything by itself including the mentioned creator, thus the art understood as activity of imparting artistic unity – or even more metaphysically – various spheres of existence; on the other side he himself – trying to encompass in his experience possibly diverse points in human time-space, so thus not as much revealing its continuity as its differentiation. Composing that, which is distinct and differentiating that, which is homogeneous becomes sense of this activity. And because as a result of this the creator becomes the work, and the work becomes his life, the unity and breakdown of it (or variety and its unification) constitute two sides of the same coin to the same extent concerning both elements of this specific alloy.