This article focuses upon the issue of the political meaning of art. It discusses the possibility of making art political. It also attempts to define the ways in which political art functions and points out two ways: as undertaking a political topic or as a form which adopts a political meaning. The research field of the article is the period 1960-1980 when art was especially political, and conceptual art in particular. Even though conceptual art fairly rarely refers directly to politics, its political content has a deeper, philosophical character. The article concentrates on the following aspects of art from the period 1960-1980: 1. The choice of the artist to occupy a position on the margin of society, contradicting the myth of the artist-genius, surrounded by glory, success and the recognition of society 2. The stance of the artist as the organiser of “artistic life”: galleries, archives, festivals, exhibitions, etc. 3. The concept of art as a specific kind of research on reality, which would then allow art to be properly placed within a university structure and treat the teaching of it as a form of an artistic practice. 4. The analytic tendency to research media used by art. 5. Problematic issues relating to the body, which, contrary to dominating models, is present in many conceptual art projects. 6. The self-reflective stance of the artist towards art, a stance that aims to criticise the term and to confront the social artistic practice, which was a feature of artistic conflict during the period 1960-1980. The conclusion points out one particular and at the same time, typical form of conceptual art which was the artist’s book. This kind of book is political by its form and is an example of making discourse political by the way art acts, not necessarily by undertaking a political discussion.
Francis Galton (1822-1911) was a “private” scholar: a traveler, a statistician, a meteorologist, but his real passion was connected with scientific laws of heredity. In 1869, he published a book entitled ‘Hereditary Genius’. In 1883, he introduced the term “Eugenism” to describe the theory of “improvement of the human race.” This theory revealed his ‘scientific’ ambitions and it included, as its instrument, composite photography, which, as Galton believed, could be sued in order to determine the ideal type of potential criminal offenders: violent and/or not violent thief, a mur- derer (but also a consumptive, gay, Jew, etc.). Galton did not realize that the tradition of the ideal forms of classicism, not to mention physiognomy, insidiously crept into his scientific theory. He neither realize to what extent his theory was based on aesthetic values characteristic to the period of time he lived in nor to what extent it was connected with the nineteenth-century aesthetic canons. Leszek Brogowski analyses the epistemological and aesthetic issues connected with composite photography and its place in the history of ideas and the history of art in the twentieth century (it significantly influenced Wittgenstein’s philosophy and inspired Freud).
The article is based upon his translation of a French text published in 1994. The text was part of a catalogue featuring an individual exhibition by Zbigniew Dlubak in Maison des expositions de Genas. There were some minimal changes introduced by the author to the original work entitled “Du sens constitué à la constitution du sens.” The text highlighted the originality of the artist's inspirations: on the one hand — similarly to other conceptualists in 1960-1970 — Dłubak was interested in semiotics and linguistics. However he was more captivated by Jakobson and Mukarowsky than Ayer and Wittgenstein. On the other hand, in a similar way to some 20th century painters, he intuitively discovered the procedures of phenomenology. Dlubak's contribution to conceptual art is based on a 'structural-painterly' approach to art, which is reminiscent of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. According to this French philosopher, language signs are 'forms in blanco'. For Dlubak, a work of art is an 'empty sign', which will acquire meaning during a process which Dlubak equaled with the work of art itself. The artist suggested an original—phenomenological—concept of aesthetic experience, which was based on the idea of stepping outside 'the world of meaning' in a search for the source where the sense of art is constituted. The discovery of the process in which the sense of art emerges and understanding its mechanisms, stand in opposition to aesthetic concepts, as these aesthetic concepts find the style as the main goal of art creation and assume that for an artist a specific style represents a specific way of thinking. Breaking away from the stylistic focus and from thinking in the categories of style, is one of the most significant elements of creation according to Dlubak; a style is an ossified and fossilised sense. One of his characteristic strategies, which is aimed at overcoming the category of style, is a parallel and concurrent use of painting and photography. He underlined the overlapping of artistic and cognitive processes and by doing so, Dlubak arrived at an original concept—not very new in the history of aesthetic thought—which sees art as ‘principle to the liveliness of one’s mind’.
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