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'Initially, the frame is static, all the time (to the end of a sequence) symetrical. Large close-up to a sphere. It is GOLDEN.
It is situated on a table (the table from the first frame with the sphere - it would be good if the table were octagonal, eventually rounded or square, but it shouldn't be triangular).
The tone is golden.
The background has the colour of an old gold and the sphere is solemnly golden.
On its sides, on the table, the hands rest. Now, they are no more white, they are usual human hands (it is important, they may need some make-up).
The draw of the camera backwards. It can be seen that behind the table there is no more the old shape but a HERMAPHRODITE. During very long drive of the camera backwards the HERMAPHRODITE is slowly raising its hands. The open hands stop as if they wanted to hug something.
Draw of the camera backwards (non-stop). The HERMAPHRODITE is vanishing in the far perspective. Only a small golden spot glitters on the dark screen
(1)
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October 11th, 1969. Piastowska 1/10, Katowice. A loft next to the studio of Urszula Broll and Andrzej Urbanowicz. The evening 'mystery'
(2)
is held where Andrzej Urbanowicz and Henryk Waniek decided to show Encyclopedia, also called Lexicon or simply 'black cards'
(3)
. They were presented on the fringes of the loft. In some other places kinds of altars were set and certain objects, things found, odds and ends, objects of symbolic function were placed.
In the middle, the canvas, resembling shoddy backgrounds for taking photographs with holes for hands and head, was stretched. It pictured the Hermaphrodite amongst the star symbols. Everything was golden in tone (a part of the scenography from the film Rebis was used there).
Dim light of a few candles scattered on the surface of the loft merely dissipated the darkness.
Low music could be heard from the tape-recorders - each of them had its own tune and they were not synchronized.
'Having dived into that space' the participants of the show fell into a peculiar mood of emotional tention.
They spontaneously started to liquidate the little altars and brought the fragments of them next to the Hermaphrodite. 'After some time, a kind of altar with steps emerged. Wide, dark golden foil covered the stairs like a carpet. At a certain moment all the objects and all the candles were there.
It was dark everywhere and only one spot was illuminated'
(4)
. Some of the participants felt the magic of that evening and fixed their eyes on the 'altar' for a long time, some of them felt a bit oddly. The altar was extended by a few meters long roll of paper on top of which Henryk Waniek wrote: 'Oh, the Noble One Love the Loving! Yes.'
The invited guests were to sign that letter-roll but not all of them did.
At the end of the letter Waniek wrote: 'and Freed your soul'.
That mystery-show, later called 'the black mass', let the participants express their feelings instinctively, violently and out of controll. They were put in a state of mediumistic transe which was designed to overcome conventions and customs, to inspire imagination by contact with unexpected and unpredictable objects and events.
Andrzej Urbanowicz and Henryk Waniek undertook a lot of similar, happening-like, activities in the years 1967-1971. One of them was a provoking happening The Life and Death of Joan of Arc
(5)
. It created the extreme situation by shaping and influencing the perception process of a viewer-participant. Its aim was to be traumatic, to shock the viewer and free him from mental inhibitions. By revealing subconscious inhibitions it was possible to achieve an archetypal experience.
Andrzej Urbanowicz, together with Henryk Waniek, arranged also 'pseudo-happenings', mocking at boredom of, typical for happening, conventional language, full of bombastic and pathetic expressions (organised in The Katowice Gallery - Symposium: Salvatore Dali or The Dynamic Varnishing Day).
One of the last common actions done by these two artists was connected with openning of the second show of 'the black cards' in The Contemporary Art Gallery in Warsaw, in April 1970
(6)
. During the preparations for the exhibition and the happening Andrzej Urbanowicz corresponded with Janusz Bogucki, the manager of The Contemporary Art Gallery, about these matters. Let us quote a fragment of a letter from March 12th, 1970: '... a few words of explanation
[writes Urbanowicz - note M. M.] concerning a scenario, something we would like to do - you mentioned about it yesterday by the phone.
So, we have been thinking about it but some essential difficulties appear, which, anyway, we hope to overcome.
The point is that during last years we developed spontaneity to such degree that it seems impossible for us to do something on a given subject or to do something on purpose, for the time difference between intention and realisation precludes intention and consequently, etc.
I do not know if you can understand me well, but it is a mental state in which when you know what to do, you do not want to do it and you can hardly see any sense in doing it.
Why should I do something what is already done, even though only intentionally? In fact, at present moment if I do anything it is only because I do not know what I do or what I will do in the long run.
I do not intend anything, but if so, very little. And even this what is intended, changes perpetually, so everything can change into nothing and vice versa, nothing into everything, up into down, left into right and so on.
Well, it is not so that we want to hide anything but rather the fact that the 'idea' has been growing slowly and it is going to be 'mature' exactly at the time of realisation, not a moment earlier
(7)
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After a retrospect exhibition in 1992, in The Contemporary Art Gallery BWA in Katowice, recapitulating the artistic works from years 1962-1992, Andrzej Urbanowicz's concern is particularly on paratheatical activity.
His project inspired the origin of the theatre Oneiron 2. The spectacle Fetters inaugurated its activity on 8th December 1992 in The BWA Gallery in Katowice
(8)
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Some sources and plots from this author's theatre can be identified with action-shows of Andrzej Urbanowicz and Henryk Waniek and can recall frames from the 'alchemic' film Rebis I mentioned earlier.
The 'altar', which symbolically refers to the previous actions, is the central element of the Fetters. It does not picture the Hermaphrodite but Extasis.
Despite anticipations and references I mentioned, theatre Oneiron 2 is, however, a new chapter in Andrzej Urbanowicz's artistic realisations.
Defining his paratheatrical actions Urbanowicz recalls the theatre of Antonin Artaud, which was 'happening coming of itself'. The artist refers to Artaud's conception of total thearte of 'direct action' where all the theatrical means of expression are used at the same time.
The violent vitality makes out of scenic action 'the center of the plaque as well as the center of saving anxiety' in order to release the subdued energy which 'sleeps in all sorts of form'.
In his transgressive theatre - magical and visionary - with typical poetic art of ritual anarchy, the author wants to blur the borders between ceremonial and mystic event, between pathos of eroticism and triviality of obscenity.
The spectacle Fetters is a parabolic story about human unextinguished passions, dark desires, doubts and entangelments. It is a trial to break down the taboo of mysteries concerning human nature, for only spontaneous sexual reactions are able to free a man from his fears and prejudices.
A permanent vision of a man and the world can be found in eroticism.
Josephin Pladan outright connects art with lust, whereas Susan Sontag indicates that totality of eroticism can lead to 'erotic imperative'.
Filled with sensuality scenes of the spectcle Fetters show the aspects of hidden eroticism: fetishism, agressive sex, sadomasochism. Hidden desires or phantasmagoria are able to move the borders of erotic possibilities to infinity.
In the culmination of the spectacle the 'web', woven of obsessions and fancies, which covers everything during the scene of peculiar pandemonium, becomes destroyed.
Only the torn fetters, emptiness and lack of fulfilment are left - between the sphere of necessity and the sphere of freedom.
The main stress of the spectacle is on the visual elements (appealing to iconosphere and mtier of Andrzej Urbanowicz's artistic works) and apart from a short song-lullaby, the happening is held without words.
Let us notice that aesthetic values of the performance seem to be far from dominating their emotional aspect.
In the spectacle Fetters the pictures 'dance', they smoothly come into one another, according to the visual language of movements - gestures, attitudes or objects-requisites.
The ritual of movement and mimic, the extatic dance, cry - evoke cult mysteries, past and contemporary rites, full of archetypal meaning.
Each scene, endowed with 'immanent energy', when looking for the form to express the things wanted, reveals, sometimes openly, sometimes secretly or in a hidden way, the new meanings.
After all, this art is about self dependance of dreams, and in a dream or through a dream everything may happen. Óneiros means a dream or a reverie in Greek, so it suggests diving into subconsciousness.
'All of us are on mercy of dreams...' but it is a dream that extricates imagination, broadens the area of experience, becomes a record of pictures possible to recall.
Following the dreamy and visionery art of Andrzej Urbanowicz, watching its associative and imaginative character, we meet objects oniriques, bricoleurs or the collage Antinew. The Inexaustible Divinity of Chaos.
Inauguration of the spectcle-performance Burlesque?, a group realisation of the theatre Oneiron 3, was held on 9th May 1996 in the EL Gallery in Elbląg.
The action of the spectacle is held in a central point of rounded space where actors and all the requisites are covered with grey linen. On the one hand, this unidentified configuration is designed to make an impression of chaos,
on the other hand, it resembles something like a great, rolled into irregular circle snake-dragon.
Its image is suggested by delicately painted scales pattern, lion's claw, or dragon's head.
The heart-beat record stands for music accompanying the whole spectacle, it is followed by the record of the roar of the ocean, singing of the Indians and the Tibetan choirs. Gradually, the actors, entering the interaction, uncover the sheets of linen
(9)
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These are the first sequences of the Burlesque? [Polish: Krotochwila, lit. the moment of Crotos, note H. K.], the story about inspiration which causes the emergence of a form from chaos and causes its coming back to the chaos again.
The spectacle's name can be originated from Crotos, the priest of Tiamat, for Urbanowicz recalls the myth about creation of the world, about rebellion of gods against Tiamat -
the Great Mother, the goddess of chaos, who ruled the universe, about the victory of god Marduc and the origin of a new world based on a new order which replaced the source of evil - the chaos
(10)
. Urbanowicz rejects this cosmogonic order, he always takes the side of chaos which is the very beginning of everything and the source of every existence. Looking at it today, from the perspective of the end of the second millenium,
the author wants to replace that binary opposition chaos-order/chaos-cosmos with a new unifico, a new paradigm of chaos.
Urbanowicz identifies chaos with causative, female energy, which is orderly, full of fantasy and imagination and has creative revealing power.
In the middle of a circle marked with light, where the penetrating energy is to concentrete we can identify 'the beginning' and 'the end'. They have the character of dialectic unity - one does not exist without the other, one changes into the other.
The picture of Andrzej Urbanowicz The Great Garota i. e. Splendor Solis, painted on the turn of 1963 and 1964, presents the sun 'but at the same time it is a kind of a death mask, inspired by the masks from Mycnae.
The sun rays are directed inwards, like the teeth of a garota, the Spanish device for strangling the men condemned to death. [...]
A pretty large part of the picture is covered with cuneiform characters'
(11)
. The solar circle - the key symbol. The golden sepulchral mask of Mycnae. Cuneiform characters of the Assyrian writing. This picture is a kind of Urbanowicz's entre into the area of ancient Assyrian, Egyptian or Greek culture and religion, into fascination with occultism,
magic, esoteric tradition, gnosis - specific way of spiritual study.
With insight he studies matters connected with alchemy and combines them with psychological approach of Jung.
Between 1964 and 1968 Urbanowicz painted probably less than 10 oil pictures and several water-colours
(12)
. There are usually a few simple signs in the pictures and drawings from that time: the sun's disc, the horizon, the sky, the earth and the shape of a mountain in the place where the sky and the earth meet.
Both, oil paintings with furrow structure and those on paper, are without action, but these are not works of emptiness.
Over the jagged line of the mountain ridges, sometimes over a lonely mountain, high and steep, the sun-hot and animated by an element, is spread (Jung's centric form).
In the bispherical composition the red-hot part of the sky-light is contrasted with the volcanic sphere of nobody's land.
These 'landscapes of the world's soul', intriguing with austere forms, are penetrated by metaphysical light, fiery lucidity (red colour is a sign of perfect stability and permanent perfection).
Andrzej Urbanowicz, in his former works often refers to alchemic matters, particularly their symbolic and metaphysical aspect. In the alchemic process, when working over Opus Magnum (the Great Work) -
when the ordinary matter changes into gold (divine spirit Sol) the whole world changes, according to the rule of unity of micro and macrocosm.
The alchemic process starts from nigredo (the black, death which conditions every existence; it is coming back to primaeval shapelessness -
the beginning of the change is in chaos), the next stage albedo (the white, compared to the Sunrise or the full Moon) leads us to citrinitas and rubedo the last, red phase of the process.
It represents marriage (coniunctio oppositiorum - the unity of oppositions) of a couple presented symbolically as a King and a Queen, the Sun and the Moon, fire and water, dark and bright
(13)
. Lapis or Filius Philosophorum (Philosopher's Stone), of different shapes, often defined as alchemic 'gold', emerges out of that marriage. 'Vas Mirabile of the alchemist, his stoves, his retorts [...] are the place of coming back to the primaeval Chaos,
repeating the cosmogony; the substances die and rise from the dead to change finally into gold'
(14)
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In 1969 Andrzej Urbanowicz painted an inaugurating portrait of god Helios (Greek god of the sun - Latin Sol), an image of a head, with features of the author's face, surrounded with radiant aureole.
The head constitutes the main element of the picture, painted for forty years and untitled The Discovered Sun.
This work, by combining far away in time periods of Urbanowicz's art, proves that ideas, myths, symbols concerning the sun and light, its essential meaning and 'spiritual and formal incarnations', are permanently present in his painting.
The sun is a symbol of light, infinity, all-seeing god.
Violent, irregular movements of the solar matter which appear on the Sun,
so called turbulent movements, and also sun-spots and strong magnetic field which appear on the surface, seem to be the problems undertaken by the artist recently.
The colours of these works are mostly a range of pastel tones; bright and, in a way lucid.
The artist casts on the surface of his pictures bright, irregular net of lines, using slight touches of the brush.
There are also marks which have the shape of drops or grains of rice, they resemble granulation covering the most of the Sun's surface (in the layer of the photosphere),
they make an impression of pulsating vibration and they soften the stiff lines.
The Egyptian mythology is present in Andrzej Urbanowicz's painting and I'd like to recall a record about god-sun appearing early in the east,
between two mountains, and starting his journey across the sky in a barge called magnet (usually pictured as a red, burning disc).
He comes the first, at the beginning of the world and keeps repeating that ritual every morning.
'Another very popular belief was that the sun is a child which enters the mouth of the goddess of the sky - Nut in the evening, at night it passes across her boody and is born again out of her womb'
(15)
. Nut
(16)
, the goddess swallowing the night-sun and giving birth to the day-sun (according to one of theological conceptions the god-sun Re is taken here to consideration) - the stars are her souls.
The old Egyptian opinion concerning sight, continued and developed by Plotinos, assumes that human eye wouldn't be able to observe the light of the sun if it didn't have the solar nature.
In ancient Egypt, the eye of Horus, one of the solar gods, was a solar talisman, the eye which could see as well as send the light
(17)
. There are references to all-seeing 'eye of the world' - the Sun/god: in myths, religion, magic or symbolic representation of parareligious and paraethical movements.
In Urbanowicz's pictures solar symbols are sometimes combined with an emblem of a serpent/serpent-dragon - Ouroboros (which is of frequent occurence in almost all the artistic works of the author).
Ouroboros (a serpent gnawing its own tail; in the shape of serpens mercurii - the symbol of Gnostics and alchemists)
devours itself and permanently revives, expressing the unity of the universe, both material and spiritual.
It is a symbol of continuous transformation in the centuries-old change of everything into everything.
The serpent-dragon is a symbol of the primaeval chaos Tiamat (the first mother).
Negative connotations of this what is unrevealed, not this what is unlimited in its potential, what is meigma (mixture of everything) where every particle contains all the other ones, are attributed to her.
There is a particular message in the last realisations of Andrzej Urbanowicz:
to regain the sense of existence, by standing in opposition to these aspects of contemporary civilisation, suicidally destroying the best values, we must deny that chaos and order are contradictions and we have to accept the new paradigm of chaos.
Andrzej Urbanowicz is not connected with the tradition of modern art which could be defined as formal exploration.
His works are not a result of an analysis according to the rules concerning abstract codification of colour, form and matter, their mutual dependence and contamination.
He wants the picture to be written down in imagination as something much deeper than a group of certain forms, composed this or that way.
Painting should not be limited to 'outer surface' but it should express different spiritual, emotional states and transmit various ideas.
The most important problem here is the contents of meaning, articulating ideas of timeless value.
The author does not want, not for a moment, to report reality: he questiones the mimetic role of art, its recording, copying or illustrating character.
For Urbanowicz, the work of art cannot constitute a simple communiqu only, it should go beyond casual meaning.
The sources of his works are various but blueprints and plots penetrate and overlap one another, not only discovering different nuances of senses but also creating senses so far unknown.
The artist, trying to reveal the 'order' of things, builds a picture based on constant semiotic elements, set in varied, enriched and redefined, language areas.
The composition of an icon, having its own specific order, framing signs in different coincidences, is governed by its own rules.
Though Urbanowicz's art shows connections between meaning and sign, nevertheless it seems to be difficult to define it in words.
The artist creates works full of intentional expression, so one can look at them from surprisingly many points of view.
The message of this art seems to be, in many aspects, prophetic.
This what is close and visible, in the art of Andrzej Urbanowicz, is referred to this what is invisible.
The picture becomes the presence of this what is absent.
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