Constructing a biennial: sixty-two international artists took part in last fall's first-ever Lodz Biennale, launching the manufacturing city's unconventional Artists' Museum

Visitors last fall to the gritty Polish industrial center of Lodz, 80 miles southwest of Warsaw, had the opportunity to see not only the country's first international biennial exhibition, but the new permanent home of the International Artists' Museum [see "Front Page," Apr. '04]. Several days before the opening on Oct. 2, Ryszard Wasko, chairman of the Biennale and the museum's executive director, received a letter from the mayor of Lodz, Jerzy Kropiwnicki, a Solidarity-era comrade jailed during the martial law period of the 1980s, which Wasko spent in exile. The letter granted the Artists' Museum the sprawling brick complex, a former textile manufacturing site idled by the disappearance of captive socialist markets. The Lodz Biennale occupied an area of approximately 100,000 square feet, including double-height, beautifully proportioned ground-level spaces and upper-story lofts. The earliest buildings, dating from the 19th century, feature uneven wooden floors and small, deep-set windows that create the air of a monastery refectory. Among the more recent structures is a splendid Jugendstil powerhouse, a cathedral for turbines, where several events related to the Biennale were held. Three other shows, devoted exclusively to Polish artists, were held concurrently elsewhere in the city [see p. 63].

Mayor Kropiwnicki opened the Lodz Biennale with an exuberant official greeting, just as he had opened the first of Wasko's seven itinerant Construction in Process exhibitions in Lodz in 1981, at the time of the brief Solidarity upsurge that preceded the martial-law crackdown later that year. During a 12-day working period before the Biennale's opening, many of the artists reprised the on-site work experience of the earlier shows, spending at least several days enduring the "process" of locating materials, tools, assistants--maybe even an electrician--but also participating in a warm collegial atmosphere of communal dinners and performances. The latter included one by Fluxus veterans Emmet Williams and Ben Patterson as Mr. and Mrs. Rat expounding an animal-based philosophy ("The first ox, Socrates, said..."), as well as a lovely improvisational Japanese dance with a tattered umbrella by Kazuko Miyamoto, accompanied vocally by artist Malcolm Green.

The selection committee for the event consisted of three artists (Lawrence Weiner, Emmet Williams and the late Leon Golub) and six critics (Zdenka Badovinac, Robert C. Morgan, Anda Rottenberg, Won Il-Rhee, Gregory Volk and Lilly Wei), each of whom chose seven artists. Sixty-two artists were shown, one having dropped out. Participants were given explicit guidelines, which included the opportunity to select specific spaces in the exhibition complex and a budget to have installation elements fabricated ahead of time, in Poland if possible.

Wasko intended to create by this approach a very different kind of Biennale from the commodity-oriented exhibitions proliferating around the globe. "What was always important for Construction in Process," he explained, "was this ... gathering of people from all over the world--coming, seeking, talking, fighting for space, whatever. So our aim here is to create an energy, a dialogue among artists" [see A.i.A., Mar. '91 and Mar. '01].

The notion of artists crossing paths, appearing, disappearing, coming together, agreeing, disagreeing, was captured elegantly by the Florentine artist Mimmo Roselli, whose Round Lodz consisted of three sets of five taut ropes, like threads of fabric shuttling through space, which seemed to emerge from the floor, sail into and out of walls and past pillars, creating a perspective effect as they disappeared once more into the floor. Another veteran artist, Charles Ginnever, reprised a piece from the early days of SoHo, which this event brought to mind, creating a Zip of three connected 20-foot lengths of 6-inch pipe, each suspended from its center, zigzagging through the pillars of the space, and making a pleasant gong as visitors jostled it.

Other artists dealt more directly with the exhibition site and the larger environment of Lodz. When the Taiwanese artist Hong-wen Lin first saw the alcove in which he would install a hanging cylinder of bound bamboo--perhaps 10 feet long and 2 feet in diameter, tapering to 1 foot at the top--he insisted that the rear wall not be patched or painted: its crumbling surface revealed, beneath the plaster, wattle of century-old reeds closely resembling the bamboo in his work. Nearby, an almost impenetrable thicket, perhaps 30 feet across and rising above head height, was made by Korean-born New York artist Sook Jin Jo from lumber scraps and branches she had found on the factory grounds. The artist uses abandoned materials in her work to evoke the traces of people and events that have touched them. Here the charred and broken wood suggested a history of neglect and destruction, yet that past seemed to be subsumed by ungainly but unstoppable new growth recalling the interconnectedness and cyclical nature of life.