(The text was published in exhibition catalogue: Jerzy Bereś. Art bends life, Bukier Sztuki Gallery, Kraków 2007)

Jerzy Bereś’s manifestations may be thought of as actions or events but he insists that they bear no relationship to the phenomenon of happenings. The manifestations have a programme, purpose, and range of meaning.¹Jerzy Bereś, Nie jestem rzeźbiarzem (I am not a sculptor), „Odra”, 1978 no 11, p. 50 [my translation]. Happenings, he maintains, do not. Bereś is not a happener then, nor, he maintains, a performance artist; neither a body artist in the conventional sense, nor, as he once said, a sculptor. Of course, the artist’s insistence on terminological distinctness comes with the (neo) avant-garde territory. The compulsion for sub-categorisation becomes understandable when we consider that the umbrella term “action” covers 1960s and 70s extra-disciplinary practices as incommensurable as Viennese Actionism and Julius Koller’s Universal Futurological Operations. Bereś’s choice of the term “manifestation,” though, is more generous and revealing of the practice it defines than most. A definition provided by the Oxford English Dictionary points out three main registers of meaning: perceptual, political, and spiritual.²“1. a. The action of making manifest; exposition, explanation; the fact of being manifested; the demonstration, revelation, or display of the existence, presence, qualities, or nature of some person or thing. […] b. An instance of making manifest; the particular form in which someone or something is manifested; that by which something is manifested. […] c. Christian Church. The action of making known to another the state of one’s conscience. Rare. […] d. Demonstration […] 2. Spanish Law. A process by which an accused person might be protected form the animosity and precipitate action of judges and removed to a special prison out of their reach. Obs., rare. […] 3. A public act on the part of a government intended as a display of its power and determination to enforce some demand. Obs., rare. […]4. Spiritualism. A phenomenon or collection of phenomena by which the presence of a spirit is supposed to be rendered perceptible. Freq. in pl. […]”. From Oxford English Dictionary [Online 2007] (draft revision Sept. 2001), http://www.oed.com/. These are the threads woven together in this work. Although Fluxus artists had previously appropriated this word (Flux-manifestations), they had not attempted or intended anything like the sustained investigation of its multiple dimensions that Bereś embarked on when he began making manifestations in 1968, a project that has sustained him creatively to this day.

Bereś’s first public foray into action was, arguably, during Tadeusz Kantor’s Panoramic Sea Happening in August 1967. Kantor had “introduced” the happening to Poland in 1966, thereafter co-ordinating a series of absurdist semi-spontaneous collective events. Although he used the term “happening,” he did not quite play the American game. The generally top-down approach, that Kantor’s experience as a theatre director had accustomed him to, was (perhaps deliberately) in breach of the spontaneity advocated by Alan Kaprow, even if, in theory, chance elements were embraced. His “scores” (here too we see the parallel with Fluxus, this time the Flux-score) were, tellingly, usually written after the event. One of the events scheduled for the Sea Happening was an updated, live-art version of Gricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818). Kantor had invited Bereś to participate creatively but, most probably, had assumed that his contribution would be sculptural. Bereś, meanwhile, took advantage of the (reported) presence of two-thousand odd people on the beach at Łazy (on the Baltic coast near Osieki) to navigate a course of his own – staging a sort of a guerrilla action that adhered neither to Kantor nor Kaprow. He transformed the production of a mast for the raft into a demonstrative alternative to the happening, with an action that was simple but bold. The artist dug a long wooden pole deep into the sand and, wearing a heavy halter-rope around his neck, the end of which was tied to the pole, he walked in circles around it, forming a sort of winch. Having prepared himself and the pole in this way, the object was hoisted onto the huge wooden raft that had been built for the programmed reconstruction of the romantic masterpiece.

It has been suggested that Kantor’s decision to reconstruct this painting in particular was motivated by the fact that it was the first ever large-scale attempt by any painter to document a contemporary political scandal. If this is so, and it seems a compelling thesis, then the fact that it was Bereś who produced the means by which to propel this catastrophic historical construction seems, in hindsight, exceptionally appropriate; more so than Kantor could have anticipated. For Bereś turned what could easily have been no more than a banal piece of carpentry on the one hand, or a travesty of heroism, on the other, into a profound meditation on the possibilities and limitations of humans to become the agents of their own salvation. The seriousness of his metaphor was in marked contrast to the carnivalesque climate of Kantor’s happening. At the same time as suggesting a way out, however, Bereś mobilised the circular logic of defeat; creating a reflection on inefficiency.³Andrzej Kostołowski, Chichot czasu. Uwagi o sztuce Jerzego Beresia (The giggle of time. Comments on Jerzy Bereś’s art), in cat.: Zwidy, Wyrocznie, Ołtarze, Wyzwania, ed. A. Węcka, Poznań 1995, p. 31. Going around in circles as he did, whilst not without humour, was also clearly resonant in relation to the contemporary communist bureaucratisation of all aspects of life.⁴See Klara Kemp-Welch, Excursions in Communist Reality: Tadeusz Kantor’s Impossible Happenings, “Object. Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture” 2005-2006, no. 8, p. 45-46, in which I discuss this happening as a critique of communist realities. The flow of registers from aesthetic to political, from transcendental to material, as well as the sheer range of meaning the action suggested are characteristic of Bereś’s manifestations generally.

My position is that art has precedence over politics […] through art we can talk about everything, also about politics […], he once remarked, unambiguously.⁵Jestem za otwarciem dialogu. Z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawiają Ł. Guzek i W Bosak (I am for opening a dialogue. Ł. Guzek and W. Bosak talk to Jerzy Bereś), “Tumult” 1990, no. 6, p. 41 [my translation]. Bereś expands art’s field to incorporate the political, but without making this its sole aim. For him, art has to do with the creation of values that open beyond the sphere of the social or political. The artist, through his creating, transcends his situation. As is often pointed out, ideas such as these show Bereś’s sympathy for the project of 19th century Romanticism. The tremendous energy of the red and white bowstring stretched taut in Prophecy I (1968) is doubtless a metaphor of the energy which is stored in alt the artist’s works, as Jerzy Hanusek has written.⁶Jerzy Hanusek, Jerzy Bereś: Twórczość jako wyzwanie (Jerzy Bereś: artistic activity as a challenge), in cat.: Zwidy, Wyrocznie, Ołtarze, Wyzwania, op. cit., p. 9. It is also clearly related to the historic Polish struggle for independence, a theme explored most explicitly in the 1981 manifestation Wheelbarrow of Freedom. Such actions are also significant because they are concerned to represent the struggle of the human spirit for freedom, universally. As Bereś once explained in an interview, whilst he considers it worth “hooking” a thought onto a contemporary situation, what really matters in art is what is timeless.⁷Jestem za otwarciem dialogu. Z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawiają Ł. Guzek i W Bosak (I am for opening a dialogue. Ł. Guzek and W. Bosak talk to Jerzy Bereś), op. cit., p. 41 [my translation].

Artistic claims towards transcendence have come under sharp fire over the past few decades; universalising tendencies are, for obvious reasons, regarded by many as suspect, or at least problematic. The figure of Joseph Beuys’s has concentrated such debate, and provides a useful critical framework for the consideration of Bereś’s manifestations, which may appear to hold similarly universal ambitions. Benjamin Buchloh has drawn attention to the following problems:

Can one, for example, be concerned with the legacies of Auschwitz and at the same time with the legacies of Leonardo? Can one reconcile the deep commitment to the continuation of the project of German Romantic culture and be an active participant of Fluxus? And, in fact, if this were possible, does this multiplicity of interpretative demands and desires (…) [not] dequalif[y] and declassify[y] artists who do not share such universalist claims?⁸Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Reconsidering Joseph Beuys. Once Again, in cat.: Joseph Beuys. Mapping the Legacy, ed. Gene Ray, New York 2001, p. 78-79.

These are clearly important questions; and they are all questions with which Bereś has engaged systematically in manifestations such as his six-day action Wooden Road, or his Face Altar (both in 1974). Beuys’ predilection for posing as a shaman, encouraging a cult of his personality and suggesting his rituals hold within themselves a mystical, redemptive power, have caused him considerable disservice. His offer of redemptive closure, it is argued, is dangerous.⁹According to Buchloh, he claimed to have [come] “to terms with the past for all Germans, absolving us from guilt by his acts of cultural commemoration” (Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, op. cit., p. 78-79). Bereś’s manifestations almost without exception also use ritual, but, I believe, towards more interrogative ends – among others, to encourage openness and discussion that might enable individuals to find their own path to grief and reconciliation.

Controversially using words such as altar and mass, and constructing manifestations around them, Bereś challenges the ownership of language by particular groups, and therefore the mechanisms behind the production of meaning. The criticism and scepticism he has faced over the years show how and, more importantly, why it is often difficult to use language simply to articulate his message.¹⁰Jestem za otwarciem dialogu. Z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawiają Ł. Guzek i W Bosak (I am for opening a dialogue. L Guzek and W. Bosak talk to Jerzy Bereś) op. cit., p. 44 [my translation]. He uses ritual to interrogate language and vice-versa, in explorations of why the symbolic systems that we use to mediate with the world are never neutral. When he paints words on his body, Bereś reflects on how meanings are made in a dynamic relationship between the enunciator and object. One word per manifestation is enough: the poetry of the actions does the rest, launching the spectator on an actively critical, contemplative journey. After the manifestation, the documentation takes over this role. Bereś’s intellectual messages, Hanusek has written, are addressed to the imagination, and imagination, after all, is always possible.¹¹Jerzy Hanusek, op. cit., p. 16. Bereś is singularly generous in this sense, because the manifestations are often built around objects that become “material documents.”

This embrace of the material document is in marked contrast to the usual insistence on ephemeral quality of, in very different ways, conceptualism and performance art. To put it crudely, on the one hand, all there is deadpan paperwork, on the other, the insistence that “you had to be there”. Bereś’s material documents, meanwhile, are reminders of the moment of fusion. Of the object and the action. We achieve fullness.¹²Jerzy Bereś, Nie jestem rzeźbiarzem (I am not a sculptor), op. cit., p. 50 [my translation]. This fullness, and the lack it suggests as its opposite, are at the heart of post-conceptual practice – he paradoxical unmasking of the fallacies of dematerialisation, and a highly conceptualised re-materialisation. Bereś has always been vehemently vocal in his anti-conceptualism (of the Kosuthian variety) and perhaps here we see why: he understood quite clearly its absurd stumbling block – the document. He saw the limitations, the futility, and the danger of the disavowal of the material world quite clearly. Bereś’s manifestations intended, among others, a challenge to contemporary conceptual practice. His matter-of-fact nudity, meanwhile, quietly subvertes performance by refusing the shock-value effects with which it usually serves up the body.

Bereś’s stated reasons for appearing naked in his actions are disarmingly simple, as one might expect: the pursuit of purity […] the pursuit of sincerity […] practical necessity – in order to be able to apply paint to his body.¹³Ibidem, p. 51. His nudity, besides being a declaration of openness, contains a deflationary impulse that is a welcome counterpoint to the pathos of much performance practice in this period. Although, of course, Bereś does suggest that the body can stand for something beyond itself, that it can be in some way indicative of the immortal, I think it would be a shame to bypass entirely the humorous aspect of Bereś’s use of the body. As Yoko Ono once commented: I wonder why men can get serious at all. They have this delicate long thing hanging outside their bodies […] terribly dangerous […] the inconsistency of it, like carrying a chance alarm or something. […] Humour is probably something the male of the species discovered through his own anatomy.¹⁴Yoko Ono, On Film no. 4 (in taking the bottoms of 365 saints of our time), in cat.: Yoko Ono. In Facing, ed. J. Hendricks, London 1990 (pages unnumbered). Bereś has always proved prepared to start the ball rolling, by laying himself bare; trying to get back to zero, as he put it, to nature. By making the nudity in question his own (rather than appropriating the bodies of others in a primitivising fantasy), Bereś stakes out a sort of neutral territory, a platform from which to explore reality.

One just has to have contact with authentic reality, he wrote. Our post-war struggle could be decoded on the principle that there exists authentic reality and artificial reality, built through propaganda, ideology.¹⁵Jestem za otwarciem dialogu. Z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawiają L. Guzek i W. Bosak (I am for opening a dialogue. L. Guzek and W. Bosak talk to Jerzy Bereś), op. cit., p. 46-47 [my translation]. However, the artificial reality or its deformation, as he often refers to it, borrowing one of Witkacy’s favourite terms, was not exclusively a problem of Stalinism, or of the Gierek era. The fact that Bereś continues to repeat many of his earlier manifestations today is a sign that we need to be on our guard still. As Jerzy Hanusek remarked in 1995, although some observers might suppose that after a systemic revolution, which we have just experienced, they would lose much of their relevance (…) the reverse is the case. Intensifying certain processes and slowing down others, the communist system let the artist have insights into the nature of social and political phenomena which in the democratic system are disguised and alleviated, or seem as natural as air and hence do not provoke reflection.¹⁶Jerzy Hanusek, op. cit., p. 18.

Bereś’s manifestations, quite simply, cause us to pause and reflect. In the end, the role they claim for art is surprisingly humble; perhaps it is no more than to provoke discussion about how we form our material and spiritual values – about reality and its transformation. To achieve such discussion would be a great deal.

translated by Monika Ujma

• 1
  Jerzy Bereś, Nie jestem rzeźbiarzem (I am not a sculptor), „Odra”, 1978 no 11, p. 50 [my translation].
• 2
  “1. a. The action of making manifest; exposition, explanation; the fact of being manifested; the demonstration, revelation, or display of the existence, presence, qualities, or nature of some person or thing. […] b. An instance of making manifest; the particular form in which someone or something is manifested; that by which something is manifested. […] c. Christian Church. The action of making known to another the state of one’s conscience. Rare. […] d. Demonstration […] 2. Spanish Law. A process by which an accused person might be protected form the animosity and precipitate action of judges and removed to a special prison out of their reach. Obs., rare. […] 3. A public act on the part of a government intended as a display of its power and determination to enforce some demand. Obs., rare. […]4. Spiritualism. A phenomenon or collection of phenomena by which the presence of a spirit is supposed to be rendered perceptible. Freq. in pl. […]”. From Oxford English Dictionary [Online 2007] (draft revision Sept. 2001), http://www.oed.com/.
• 3
  Andrzej Kostołowski, Chichot czasu. Uwagi o sztuce Jerzego Beresia (The giggle of time. Comments on Jerzy Bereś’s art), in cat.: Zwidy, Wyrocznie, Ołtarze, Wyzwania, ed. A. Węcka, Poznań 1995, p. 31.
• 4
  See Klara Kemp-Welch, Excursions in Communist Reality: Tadeusz Kantor’s Impossible Happenings, “Object. Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture” 2005-2006, no. 8, p. 45-46, in which I discuss this happening as a critique of communist realities.
• 5
  Jestem za otwarciem dialogu. Z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawiają Ł. Guzek i W Bosak (I am for opening a dialogue. Ł. Guzek and W. Bosak talk to Jerzy Bereś), “Tumult” 1990, no. 6, p. 41 [my translation].
• 6
  Jerzy Hanusek, Jerzy Bereś: Twórczość jako wyzwanie (Jerzy Bereś: artistic activity as a challenge), in cat.: Zwidy, Wyrocznie, Ołtarze, Wyzwania, op. cit., p. 9.
• 7
  Jestem za otwarciem dialogu. Z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawiają Ł. Guzek i W Bosak (I am for opening a dialogue. Ł. Guzek and W. Bosak talk to Jerzy Bereś), op. cit., p. 41 [my translation].
• 8
  Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Reconsidering Joseph Beuys. Once Again, in cat.: Joseph Beuys. Mapping the Legacy, ed. Gene Ray, New York 2001, p. 78-79.
• 9
  According to Buchloh, he claimed to have [come] “to terms with the past for all Germans, absolving us from guilt by his acts of cultural commemoration” (Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, op. cit., p. 78-79).
• 10
  Jestem za otwarciem dialogu. Z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawiają Ł. Guzek i W Bosak (I am for opening a dialogue. L Guzek and W. Bosak talk to Jerzy Bereś) op. cit., p. 44 [my translation].
• 11
  Jerzy Hanusek, op. cit., p. 16.
• 12
  Jerzy Bereś, Nie jestem rzeźbiarzem (I am not a sculptor), op. cit., p. 50 [my translation].
• 13
  Ibidem, p. 51.
• 14
  Yoko Ono, On Film no. 4 (in taking the bottoms of 365 saints of our time), in cat.: Yoko Ono. In Facing, ed. J. Hendricks, London 1990 (pages unnumbered).
• 15
  Jestem za otwarciem dialogu. Z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawiają L. Guzek i W. Bosak (I am for opening a dialogue. L. Guzek and W. Bosak talk to Jerzy Bereś), op. cit., p. 46-47 [my translation].
• 16
  Jerzy Hanusek, op. cit., p. 18.