Woodstock on the Brda - art camp - Construction in Process VII—"This Earth Is a Flower"

Art in America, March, 2001 by Richard Vine

A camp near Bydgoszcz was the unlikely venue for Construction in Process 2000, a two-week summer gathering of 146 international artists and critics.

Omens

Mar. 23, 2000

Receipt today of an official invitation from Ryszard Wasko, the Polish artist and political activist who in 1990 founded the International Artists' Museum in Lodz. This alternative space began, 10 years earlier, as little more than a stack of stationery on his apartment desk and now boasts a collection of about 3,000 contemporary works, all of them donated by artists (such as Richard Nonas, Daniel Spoerri and Pat Steir) whom he has invited to exhibit in Poland and elsewhere over the years. The all-volunteer "museum" currently has many pieces on loan to several institutions with better facilities than its own, and networks with eight affiliated artist-run art centers worldwide. I last saw Wasko (as he is generally known, even to his wife) in early February at a crowded SoHo benefit for the Artists' Museum, which is now in danger of losing its 6,000-square-foot building to developers unless he can outbid them or convince government authorities to give his cultural organization another venue. Some 90 artists--including Nam June Paik, Sol LeWitt and Dennis Oppenheim--donated small works to be auctioned off for the cause in the gallerylike basement studio of Israeli-American painter Michal Sedaka.

In the midst of the din, cigar in one hand and drink in the other, Wasko urged me to come to Poland in June to participate in his other pet project: Construction in Process, an erratically scheduled invitational event that brings together scores of international artists and a handful of (fool)hardy critics in some off-the-beaten-track locale (e.g., Lodz, Melbourne, the Negev Desert) for two weeks of communal living and on-site art-making [see A.i.A., Mar. '91]. Organized seven times since its inception in 1981, the residency-cum-exhibition pointedly places as much emphasis on the formative process as on the finished works, seeking to involve artists directly with the local community and with each other.

Back in February, such is the hectic tenor of the Manhattan art scene (and the mollifying effect of Polish vodka), the proposed trip actually sounded relaxing. Now, however, a slight apprehension arrives along with Wasko's travel instructions: "Fly to Warsaw, take a train 250 kilometers north to Bydgoszcz; a bus will bring you the remaining 50 kilometers to the camp near Ostrowce."

I e-mail Wasko, thanking him for the enclosed photo of himself in conversation with the prime minister of Poland, and inquiring as to the exact nature of my "participation" in the upcoming event. Wasko says not to worry and refers me to the independent curator and A.i.A. contributor Gregory Volk. Electronically, Gregory explains that the undertaking is "organized by artists for other artists" and is thus "unorthodox, unusual, sometimes ridiculous, but very often inspiring." It proceeds, he says, "unencumbered by ceremony, officialness, restraint"--an approach that "historically has had a profound impact on the lives of its participants." There is much more in his lengthy e-mail about things like "communion," "family" and "the human interaction that is encouraged (sometimes idiotically, sometimes wonderfully)."

Gregory's account, I suspect, like the improbably sappy subtitle of this year's event, "This Earth Is a Flower," is subtly calculated--all part of a cunning psychological scheme that I am beginning to think of as the "Bydgoszcz process.". Construction in Process clearly embodies an improvisational Solidarity-style communalism. (Wasko, who spent six years in self-imposed political exile after being warned of impending arrest, was deeply involved with Poland's 1980s labor movement before and after his return to the country in 1989.) Thus the program has, to use Gregory's term, a certain "freewheeling" appeal--one that strikes nostalgic resonances for any veteran of the '60s. The question is: can it produce decent art?

Arrival

June 23

Bydgoszcz (pronounced bid gosh) is an industrial town about half way between Warsaw and the port city of Gdansk, in the "Border of Kings" region where the Polish nation was born 1,000 years ago. The 1999 Rough Guide to Poland says little about the place, except to specify its most salient 20th-century woe: "by the end of World War II over fifty thousand people--a quarter of the population--had been murdered, with many of the rest deported to labour and concentration camps."

I arrive after an all-night transatlantic flight followed by a five-hour train ride, the rail journey spent looking out at the countryside while sharing a worn and faded red-velvet compartment with Michal. She, like many Jewish participants in Construction in Process, speaks darkly of a vague, free-floating anxiety that intensifies as we move deeper into the heartland of what I soon mentally call "the sadness that is Poland"--verdant fields punctuated by shoddy Soviet-era construction, factories rusted and half disused, shops stocked with drab second-rate merchandise. If this is the state of affairs after the country's fervent embrace of capitalism in 1989, one can only imagine the grimness that prevailed under Soviet rule.