Emergency exit
We’ve already done pretty, and it seems that people have had enough of it. Artistic life has speeded up, and many works have passed along with last season’s fashions. The pace is so fast that new ideas seem stale the moment they are born.
To be sure, when things get serious - you get a text message inviting you to take contribute to an exhibition - it’s good to have something ready to hang up or rather paste on a wall. But at that same instant you ought to forget it and start working on something new. To go on, leaping upon the mountains. Achievements are no longer an asset – they’re more of a burden. Merit sucks, having your own style can only make you a laughing stock, identity is putting a label on yourself with your own hands.
It may be said that Monika Zawadzka and her friends have done away with what convention and coquetry yet remained in art. Monika, for example, never parts with a bottle of Diet Coke and hates the colour yellow, because there’s too much sunshine in it. From her point of view she’s perfectly right.
When I first saw her ruthless drawings, I felt as if I was assisting at vivisection. Her works had tremendous striking power. She displayed them in a garage which she’d converted into a gallery and named the ZOO. When she’d already proved that she could get the most interesting (and craziest) of her peers to start putting on group shows, disaster struck: the ZOO lost its stable and was suddenly homeless. The forced evacuation led through the gates of the Ministry of Culture and Art, and thus the ZOO became, for the time being, ART’s next-door neighbour. This catalogue and the exhibition Emergency Exit commemorate that unexpected and absurd encounter. A nihilist carnival has broken into my territory – I’m a bit scared…
