Drawing a Line

The problem … is to represent the research process in the research product

Clifford Geertz¹

Contingency plays a prominent role in establishing how archives are contextualised, ultimately influencing how they are read, interpreted and experienced.

Ann Butler²

[B]etween tradition and oblivion, [the archive] reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.

Michel Foucault³

How might an understanding of “drawing a line” belong to the very gesture or practice which it seemingly describes? While this phrase serves as the literal form of an action, the fact that a line may be specified with any number of qualities that easily become metaphorical—being straight or crooked, circular or broken—indicates that such a description is far from neutral. Furthermore, there exists a rhetoric of drawing a line under (or over) a position or attitude, often thereby bringing an argument to a conclusion—if not necessarily to agreement. For example, one could be tempted to suggest drawing a line under the discussion of contested relations between performance and documentation, repertoire and archive, as this has very frequently been rehearsed already. However, the corollary of such a rhetorically drawn line is not simply to follow or adhere to it, but to cross it or overstep its mark—as will be the case in these reflections on (and with) various iterations, between 1965 and 1972, of Tadeusz Kantor’s work The Dividing Line (Linia podziału).

This work poses questions about the archive practices that constitute an art of “performance,” as read here through Michel Foucault’s analysis of the archive not simply as a repository of discrete artefacts but a network in which practices are recognized as, indeed, contestable. That the archive “is not a question of rediscovering what might legitimize an assertion, but of freeing the conditions of emergence of statements, the law of their coexistence with others, the specific form of their mode of being, the principles according to which they survive, become transformed, and disappear,”⁴ expands the scope of thinking not only about but also with Kantor’s “line”—with what it makes visible in being “drawn,” both historically and conceptually. Bringing to mind a division between things is enactive rather than descriptive. It makes a demand upon our understanding, appealing to our assent or dissent. The drawing becomes a dividing as an artistic gesture that simultaneously functions as a polemic.

For Kantor (as for Clifford Geertz, in my opening epigraph), the relation between research and its objects is itself an object of and for that very research—as here through questions of “documentation” and “archive” that are subject to the implications of contingency according to Ann Butler. The serendipity of research means that it is neither exhaustive nor complete(d). In the case of gathering material (or forms of “statement” to use Foucault’s term) as a montage of fragments in translation, in time, and in diverse media, the particularity of “drawing a line” cannot be a matter of defining an event (such as Kantor’s Dividing Line) with what Georges Didi-Huberman calls “reference-reverence,”⁵ as if pinning it into the art historical album as the proverbial academic entomologist might do. Rather, my reflections here aim to evoke the momentary sighting of something fluttering—even if only imagined—registering changing tones and affects in an engagement with the relation between performance and archive.

When thinking of performance histories, it might seem interesting to begin with an example of drawing. Still, the doubled presence of the body and abstraction in drawing serves as a key to both The Dividing Line’s gesture and its concept; not least, as a question of process, of what becomes intelligible beyond familiar divisions between the preparatory and the finished, or the primary and the secondary. Kantor had already staged his own exploration of this defamiliarization in his 1963 Popular Exhibition at the Krzysztofory Gallery in Krakow; and it also informed the founding commitments of the Foksal Gallery, with which his work was associated in Warsaw. In the introduction to their first exhibition, in 1966, the Foksal curators propose that:

Two aspects will be emphasised in the exhibitions organised by the Gallery. In the first place it will attempt not so much to show works as “finished” products, but to reveal them rather as materialised ideas in process with certain particular conditions and circumstances surrounding their creation. Secondly, the Gallery proposes to treat these conditions and circumstances as inherent elements in the display of art works, and to do away with the traditional division between the studio and the Gallery.⁶

These two registers, addressing the spatial and temporal conditions of exhibition and performance, also resonate here in thinking beyond the division between then and now in the historicization of performance art, which echoes the division between oblivion and canon created by the museum as archive—or (as Kantor would have it) between “eternity and the rubbish dump.”⁷

For instance, already present in Kantor’s own archive project is the invention of its retroactive future, inviting engagement with the verbs of its transmission rather than the nouns of its “permanent collection.” Here the action or gesture involved in the drawing of a line both conforms to and escapes the concept of the work—“dividing” itself, in distinction from other verbs (with their own avant-garde resonances), such as “blurring” the line or “crossing” it (“transgression”). While drawing a line invokes canonical references (from Vasari onwards) to connecting the eye and the hand (as a visualization of mind), in the specific instance of Kantor’s Dividing Line it also raises an art historical question (in the form of a manifesto) as to what might be recognized as avant-garde in performance; for Kantor, this meant whether or not that performance would, indeed, be art.

In the manifesto text that he published under the title Dividing Line, Kantor presents a catalogue of opposed values and commitments, where a general “pseudo-avant-garde,” rallying to the flag of whatever is in vogue, is denounced in favor of “the few”—“the unofficial” and “neglected”—who are actually “risk-taking” and who rally to the flag of the “impossible.”⁸ Paradoxically, both blurring and transgressing the line drawn by the artist are pre-empted by its “dividing” gesture, which encodes a residual romanticism in his insistence that the avant-garde refers to an “essential meaning [that] remains the same”⁹ throughout the revolutions of modern art. Indeed, the manifesto version of The Dividing Line—also known in English as A Demarcation Line—declares that such a line “emerges always and everywhere … eternal and immoral”¹⁰ or “amoral,” as Klara Kemp-Welch translates it.¹¹ As Piotr Piotrowski observes, it was important for Kantor “to retain the unique status of an artistic self”¹² in the individual (not to say heroic) mold of creative authorship, the anachronism of which critical art histories (such as Piotrowski’s own¹³) contextualize—and which was explored in performance (particularly with respect to its gender politics) in Jolanta Janiczak, Joanna Krakowska, Magda Mosiewicz, and Wiktor Rubin’s production, Kantor: Downtown, at Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz in 2015.

Thus, the issue of the drawn “line” in this expanded understanding concerns the challenge that performance practices pose to and for themselves (or, at least, to and for their makers), before any challenge that they might pose to audiences. Here performance (drawing a line) becomes a token for defending the claims of the avant-garde—at least for Kantor—against its supposed pretenders (a dividing line). This division manifests itself in the specific drawing of a line as it demands reflection on both the performance history it proposes and its transforming histories, as a performance itself, through the various conceptual-artistic media of its iconic image(s).

Where Kantor’s “line” proposes its own instance of a division between avant-garde and pseudo avant-garde, for example, how might research engage not simply with the drawing (or event) as a noun (an artwork that now occupies a place in the historical archive), but as a verb (in the relation between drawing and dividing)? Should research identify this with the singular action or gesture that is named by the work; or address it in terms of the applicability of the conceptual reading that it proposes? How is the temporality of the work as an event to be understood polemically—or, indeed, artistically—distinct from being defined historically? In what sense was the division between the avant-garde and both “merely professional” and “neo-avant-garde” practices itself anachronistic at the time that this very line was drawn? How might such an understanding avoid falling into the trap of identifying with the gesture’s somewhat Pauline demand to be situated on one or the other side of this division? How does the event of the dividing gesture (through “drawing a line”) continue in its various iterations, expanding the spatial-temporal conditionality of its initial performance to include an audience’s encounter with its subsequently published versions?

Reading photography with Walter Benjamin, how might the ostensibly analeptic event of the photograph evoke—or, indeed, instantiate—the proleptic afterlife of the gesture of “drawing a line”? That is, by addressing that “tiny spark of contingency of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject”—in so far as we feel ourselves addressed by it—such that “we … may rediscover it” in its photographed image?¹⁴ How might both the photographic and publication event of The Dividing Line offer a reading different from the event when remembered in terms of participation in its event as a happening? As we shall see, different registers of “participation” provide a key to The Dividing Line in the archive—not just literally but in the polemics that supposedly divide theatre and live art, or painting and performance, and which echo far beyond the particular Polish context of the 1960s and 1970s. As Amelia Jones describes in her acute analyses of the supplementary logic of performance and documentation, such questions invoke “‘presence’ in absentia,” where: “The body art event needs the photograph to confirm its having happened; the photograph needs the body art event as an ontological ‘anchor’ of its indexicality.”¹⁵ It is precisely this ontological anchoring, supposedly of photographic indexicality, that Kantor eschews in the 1972 version of the “dividing” gesture or action, which makes its return in researchers’ “reference-reverence” regarding the Happening of 1965 in theatre histories (and, indeed, in the memoires of other participants) all the more paradoxical.

The lure of something appearing completed in the past constitutes a trap that The Dividing Line sets for the researcher; as if its concept were realized and simply illustrated by its different iterations, rather than proposing questions of its own, in terms of which the gesture of its “line” would remain somewhat unfinished or incomplete. Indeed, it is interesting how writers describing the Happening that took place in Krakow at the Society of Art Historians on December 18, 1965—an event now known as The Dividing Line—have tended to do so in the context of the manifesto that was later published under this title. For instance, Klara Kemp-Welch devotes most of her account to a précis of Kantor’s subsequent publication,¹⁶ as does Marek Rostworowski in his reminiscences of the event (at least, as quoted by Anna Baranowa¹⁷). Nevertheless, in contrast to the document published under the title Cricotage—ostensibly Kantor’s “score” of the actions of the so-called first Polish Happening, held in Warsaw eight days prior to The Dividing Line¹⁸—the eponymous Krakow “documentation” offers an abstraction of only one of its actions. Indeed, the text does not even refer to Kantor’s other actions, whether enacting the Happening’s temporal structure by announcing the passing of ten-minute intervals or making a “human emballage” with Maria Stangret and rolls of toilet paper.

The fact that the Krakow event becomes identified in terms of a singularity standing for the Happening as a whole, with a claim to “authorship” that occludes the other actions—mostly reprised from the earlier Warsaw event (albeit performed by different “happeners” or participants)—points already to a more general paradox of Kantor’s Happenings. In fact, this mediation by text constitutes a reverse of the more familiar sense of Happenings where—as Michael Kirby observes in a 1971 interview in the Polish theatre journal Dialog—their “‘scripts’ have a pragmatic, work-based rather than literary function and are rarely constructed with a view to publication”¹⁹ (Kirby 1971: 146). In these terms, Kantor’s manifesto is precisely not a “script” or “score,” despite it being so often read as such in theatre researchers’ “reference-reverence” with respect to the archive (or, at least, to what they want or expect from the archive).

Of course, Kantor was perfectly aware of such paradoxes. Indeed, as an artist, he took pride in them. For instance, Kantor reminded Mieczysław Porębski of Wolf Vostell’s admonition that he (Kantor) did not really make Happenings at all, as he brought them to the limits of theatre. “Any rule followed religiously bores me … I can’t help it,” Kantor replied to Vostell with respect to the definition of a Happening (Kantor and Porębski 2015: 33). The sense of merely “following a rule” was the charge that Kantor then levelled against others. As we have seen, by doing so, Kantor turned the idea of the Happening into a ground for divisions between avant-garde and pseudo avant-garde in performance. In his manifestos from “The Impossible Theatre” (1967) to “The Theatre of Death” (1975)—particularly, in advocating his own “theatre happening” with The Water Hen production (1967–1972)—Kantor insists on his own sense of the “reality” of an artistic event and its materials, making twins of Marcel Duchamp (the readymade) and Bruno Schulz (the fascination with degraded or “lowest rank” objects) in a polemic against any kind of aesthetic realism, especially of the “socialist” kind.

At the risk of becoming embroiled in the contestation of terms between “performance art” and “performance documentation” that are precisely in question with Kantor’s example, one may note that it is far from clear whether what appears in the published text under the title of The Dividing Line was included in the 1965 event—beyond the drawing (or painting) of a line itself. While Wojciech Plewiński’s photographs of the Happening present Kantor painting the line,²⁰ they also show the sheet on which it was drawn, later covered not with words on either side of the line, but with a one-sided accumulation of plus and minus signs, circles, and dots, some of which are crossed through.²¹ Notably, Plewiński took the photographs for a proposed reportage in the Krakow cultural weekly, Przekrój, that was never published, owing to the event’s political scandal, following which Ignacy Trybulski, the head of the Society of Fine Arts, under whose aegis the event had taken place, was required to resign.²²

In the quite different photographed image under The Dividing Line title that was used for the catalogue of Richard Demarco’s Atelier ’72 exhibition of contemporary Polish artists (held at the Edinburgh Festival in 1972), we see a “blank canvas,” with only the line as a visual reference, beneath which appears a printed line—as if an extension of the photographed installation—with the textual content distributed on either side of it.²³ This image of a hanging chord bisecting a section of a wall, framed by the camera, was taken in Kantor’s apartment by Jacek Stokłosa (himself a participant in the 1965 event), to add to those originally taken by Plewiński, for an exhibition held at the Foksal Gallery in September–October 1970 that presented documentation of Kantor’s Happening and Happening-Type Activities, 1963–1970. Stokłosa also made the composite poster-sized photo-montage pages that were displayed in the exhibition.²⁴ His photographs of the exhibition itself document it for the Foksal archive as well.²⁵ This new Dividing Line image offers a somewhat autonomous (or, indeed, “closed”) artwork, prepared for exhibition purposes after the “original” event to which its title ostensibly refers.²⁶

We might call this version of the work, presented in 1970, the “1966” iteration—from the erroneous date given in the exhibition, which nonetheless indicates its displacement from the actual event in 1965. This precisely signifies its own performative dimension, making its own fiction of its ostensible referent, subsequently repeated in theatre histories, including in Michal Kobialka’s first collection of Kantor translations²⁷ and in the collected French translations, where it is described as “A Happening that took place in January 1966 in Krakow.”²⁸ The 1972 “manifesto” version of The Dividing Line—abstracted from the “documentation” version in 1970—can be thought of as a separate work, as a virtual gesture, replacing Plewiński’s photographs of the “original” event. Stokłosa’s photograph offers an iconic anchor for a purely textual version of The Dividing Line, one that had already been published without any other image than its words in an issue of Dialog in 1972 (and which is now reproduced as its authorial instance, as in Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz’s edition of Kantor’s writings in 2000²⁹).

The diverse relations between photograph and text in these variations of The Dividing Line (1965–1972), creating different instances of its “performance (as) documentation,” reinscribe the differential dynamics of the anecdotal and the authoritative, the ephemeral and the enduring, which the line draws archivally. Besides such divisions, the temporality of the event is transformed (as already suggested with Benjamin) by reference to the photographic, where (as Ariella Azoulay notes) “photography always constitutes a potential event”³⁰ (emphasis in the original)—even as Kantor himself refused to acknowledge this potential as belonging to the documentation of performance art. For him, the photographer had no authorship with respect to the image, other than in the literal requirement of taking, developing, and printing it. Obviously, Kantor’s insistence that such photographs are not the art image is unsettled when they become a condition for imagining a performance within art history, at least conceptually.³¹ Therefore, paradoxically, the “1966 version” of The Dividing Line (presented in 1970) offers an implied critique of the programme of the Foksal Gallery in showing it at all.

Was Stokłosa’s photograph, used for the 1972 Edinburgh catalogue (where it is credited to Kantor alone), the “documentation,” in a way, of a conceptual version of the Happening—as then enacted by its text, rather than the 1965 event? As distinct from Plewiński’s photographs, taken during the Happening, what does this new photographed image do for a reading of its subsequent text, even as it then appears that the text offers a reading of the image(s)—even those of Plewiński—at least, as theatre researchers have, indeed, taken it? For Azoulay:

The photograph is usually thought of as the final product of an event. In contradistinction to this common assumption, I see the photograph – or the knowledge that a photograph has been produced – as an additional factor in the unfolding of the event of photography (not of the photographed event). The encounter with the photograph continues the event of photography that happened elsewhere.³²

How might this potential temporality inform an encounter with the text of Kantor’s Dividing Line manifesto, where the event of photography is drawn into the writing (as if it then translated the photographed event)—such that even those remembering their own participation in the 1965 Happening refer to the subsequent text as if to a photograph?

This can be seen when Plewiński’s photographs contradict the composition of memory amongst those ceding the authorship (or authority) of the image-event to Kantor’s writing (produced after the event). For instance, one of the 1965 Kraków Happeners, Marek Rostworowski, describes in his memoires Kantor writing out the subsequently published text during the Happening—even as Rostworowski tells us that he was outside the room, performing another one of the Happening’s actions, bricking up the exit.³³ Maciej Gutowski too interpolates Kantor’s text into his memory of the Happening beyond simply the drawing of the line—even as he says that he saw the painted sheet only in passing when he rushed to the bathroom to wash off the shaving foam with which he was covered from the action that constituted his own participation in the event. It seems unlikely that Gutowski could have registered then what he now claims to have seen written there. Inverting the usual claims of and for the authenticity (or authentication) of experience—as an eyewitness, as having been there—what both these participants remember is presented as what can be already (re)cited from Kantor’s published version of The Dividing Line.

If, indeed, the words (or some version of them) were included in 1965, perhaps it would be more likely that they were spoken or, rather, read out loud by Kantor, as Michal Kobialka has suggested.³⁴ On the other hand, the key image of the dividing line—the very drawing of a line—is not aural but visual (with respect to its concept), as this is reproduced in its publication (including the interesting anomaly of being horizontally, rather than vertically, placed in the version published by Dialog).³⁵ The question of the iconic image of The Dividing Line gesture concerns which image is drawn on to document it, following Kantor’s own claim to authorship. Interestingly, different theatre histories present different iconic versions without offering any comment about their choices, as if the concept of The Dividing Line was the potential of each version, without being specific to the gesture belonging to any one of them. In a sense, this affirms the translation of drawing into writing, itself echoed by the translation of the photographic into the textual, which constitutes the work becoming its documentation and its archiving.

A censorship report by the Krakow Communist authorities, offering its own “review” of the 1965 proceedings, did not refer to the manifesto text at all, or even to the painting of the line. However, it did note—amongst the various actions—a “gibberish speech on art,” which was “a mockery of the official appearances of government leaders,”³⁶ as the officials interpreted it. This gibberish art-speak was a reprise of a last-minute action performed in the Warsaw Cricotage, where Kantor had invited Mariusz Tchorek, one of the founding curators of the Foksal Gallery, to contribute with some random piece of critical art commentary.³⁷ Notably, in Krakow, Janusz Tarabuła performed this role.³⁸ Thus, the fact that the Happening is now documented in terms of Kantor’s own art-critical speech (The Dividing Line text) seems all the more paradoxical—with his appropriating the role of what was, indeed, a form of mockery in the “original” (Warsaw) event. The official political documentation of the Happening does not discuss “the dividing line” because this is Kantor’s subsequent version of it, produced in the context of the Foksal Gallery’s Living Archives and signified by his own already-mentioned dating of it to 1966.

As with the actions of the other participants, The Dividing Line offers an instance of appropriation by and for Kantor’s own artistic signature as its basic metonymic gesture. Indeed, this is the case for all Kantor’s performances, which advertise their relations with other artists who are historical, such as Rembrandt, whilst subsuming the participation of his direct collaborators within his self-identification of and with the work. Jerzy Bereś, another of the 1965 Happening’s participants, describes this as “Kantor’s greatest achievement”:

[H]e managed to make of living people a work of art. He was not a theatre director. Kantor created great theatre, but he did not allow independent existence to anybody who acted or co-operated with him. As long as he lived, no other name appeared on theatre bills.³⁹

According to Bereś, Kantor even “behaved like that in everyday life. He would enter a café, and if something was not as he wanted it, he made a row, moved people about. In this way Kantor directed life.”⁴⁰ This is also visible, for example, in Kantor’s appeals—and imprecations—caught in Andrzej Sapija’s film of the last rehearsals of Today is my Birthday, which offer a moving testimony to the dialectic of dependence and independence as it animates any collaborative creation of a performance.

Where the Party guardians of History (as the supposed source of legitimation for their sanctioning of relations between art and public) referred, for instance, to the human emballage as a comment on shortages; and to the bricking up of the exit as symbolic of the difficulties in obtaining permission to travel abroad—offering a political reading of the Happening⁴¹—the subsequent (or, indeed, retroactive) dividing line was concerned with “purely” artistic controversies. The question of the exit was read as a particular slander on the People’s Republic by Kantor, as by then he was in Paris for a three-month visit. The line of division between art and politics became the point at issue in the “culture wars” of the Cold War, with its complex claims concerning “freedom” in different contexts. As Piotrowski has discussed, this did not appear the same on either side of that other dividing line, the Iron Curtain, and one must beware of reading Kantor’s drawing of the Happening’s line within the artistic sphere itself—as, perhaps, a screen against the consequences of its political scandal—in terms of the division between art and anti-art, avant-garde and kitsch, at work in the West.⁴² In this context, The Dividing Line serves as a kind of cryptonym of lines drawn within the archive, translating the Krakow version of the Cricotage into an event that became somewhat virtual through its documentation. Kantor would later affirm his aesthetic position by drawing another dividing line, this time enacted at the Foksal Gallery in 1969, during an event in which he declared “an end to participation.” As another one of the Foksal’s founding curators, Anka Ptaszkowska, notes about the complexity of this aesthetic politics at the time:

I feel I have the duty to recall the embarrassment at the idea of participation which we experienced at Foksal Gallery, for example. Let me recall Kantor’s happenings, which were seemingly an opening up to the audience and public space. At one point, however, we became aware of the fact that Kantor sees this opening up purely formally, that it is easy and purely mechanical. When he came to this conclusion, he wrote “An end to so-called participation” on the wall of the gallery, just before his Anatomy Lesson After Rembrandt happening. And so back then, in 1969, we were disenchanted with participation as an artistic form.⁴³

Leaving aside further echoes of The Dividing Line (particularly in 1975 and 1979), let us return to the opening question of drawing a line, in which we might note another classical echo. Pliny the Elder’s evocation of the proverbial saying of Apelles that not a day passes without the artist practicing drawing a line, “nullus dies sine linea,”⁴⁴ is recited two millennia later by Maciej Gutowski when recalling Kantor’s own suggestion that just as everyone needs to pee daily, so an artist needs to draw.⁴⁵ It is, precisely, in this double register—between the colloquial and the canonical, the anecdotal and the archival, the gestural and the conceptual—that Kantor’s Dividing Line continues to offer critical and paradoxical implications for archival research today, as a paradigm of and for thinking through the potential substitutions of art and documentation in an historical understanding of performance.