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Memory of Images

by Aleksandra Manczak.
Galeria Bielska BWA, Bielsko Biala, Poland.
80 pp., paperback
ISBN: 83-87984-15-9
Reviewed by Mike Mosher, U.S.A. E-mail: mikemosh@well.com


(Apologies to the artist and critics for whom ASCII text in English without the diacritical marks in the Polish language only approximates their names)

This handsome monograph elegantly presents in mid-career the artist Aleksandra Manczak's work in photography, textile, collage and gallery installations whose inspiration begins with natural objects.

In her essay Tamara Ksizek cites major influences upon the artist's aesthetic: the land art of Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria, Fritjof Capra's 1976 book _The Tao of Physics_ and the Club of Rome studies of ecological fragility. One can see those currents running through Manczak's nature photographs of seaweed in Aubisson, rusted rivets, and bare trees richly composed in the 1968-88 series "Altars for the 21st Century". Manczak's installation "Arboretum I" 1991-95 displayed withered trees in custom-cut cardboard display boxes like upended coffins.

In his essay, Jan Muszynski discusses the artist's photo-based tapestries of weeds poling through snow as a very different tendency from the neo-constructivism that supposedly prevails at Manczak's alma mater, the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz. I wonder; while not hard-edged, they still are abstract and intellectually, though not synthetically, composed. Further from spare constructivism are Manczak's collages and her series of museum-like showcases filled with dry natural objects (lacy leaves, hair, tied cotton packets), family photographs and heirlooms titled "Most Intimate Sphere-Nothing for Sale" 1992-98. This body of work is as personal, narrative and eclectic as that of Joseph Cornell, and carefully laid out as any memorabilia in a provincial small-town historical museum.

Manczak's visual ruminations from the country house stand in contrast to other contemporary Polish art like the medically-centered installations of Grzegorz Klaman, the feminist photographic projects of Katarzyna Kozrya or installations critquing educational institutions by the wryly-named Centralny Urzad Kultury Technicznej (Central Office for Technical Culture). There is a greater elegance-a delicacy even when out shooting (photographs) in the muddy countryside-and attention to craft found in Aleksandra Manczak's elegant volume. I like this book, and the coherence and totality of her aethetic that it demonstrates. Yet the artwork's restraint can be a bit chilly, quite aristocratic and distant from the political hubub and complex grope towards and away from democracy in contemporary Poland.







Updated 13 September 2000.




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