[spectre] exh. Akumulatory 2 Gallery, 1972-1990, at Zecheta Gallery, Warsaw

[Andreas Broeckmann]

"Beyond Corrupted Eye: Akumulatory 2 Gallery, 1972-1990"

A major group exhibition at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, 
runs through November 18, 2012.

http://www.zacheta.art.pl/en/article/view/928/beyond-corrupted-eye-akumulatory-2-gallery-1972-1990

This exhibition is an attempt to present the history of a gallery that 
for eighteen years of its operations remained a non-commercial space for 
presenting the work of artists from all over the world. The exhibitions 
and discussions initiated there and a critical discourse pursued in both 
theory and practice situate it among the most significant actors on the 
then map of artistic geography. Functioning in defiance of geopolitical 
divisions, the Akumulatory 2 Gallery was a place where the public was 
able to become familiar with art from the East and West, with artists 
from Eastern and Western Europe, the United States and Canada, from 
South America and Asia.

The gallery’s origins date back to the NET idea, formulated in 1971 by 
Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski, and a subsequent manifesto 
mailed to some three hundred and fifty artists and art critics in Poland 
and internationally, inviting collaboration and a free exchange of 
artistic facts. Despite official reprisals, the idea of an 
anti-institutional, non-controllable NET was continued and developed at 
the Akumulatory 2 Gallery in Poznań, founded by Kozłowski in 1972. 
Functioning until 1990, the gallery was a space where various artistic 
ideas and philosophies intersected, where various forms and modes of 
art’s functioning were presented and discussed. The gallery showed 
artists associated with conceptual art, minimal art, land art, mail art, 
concrete poetry, Fluxus, as well practices combining the visual arts 
with music.

 From 1972 to 1990 the Akumulatory 2 Gallery presented a total of one 
hundred and ninety five events, from exhibitions, through performances, 
actions and music projects, to lectures. The gallery functioned as a 
quasi-institution, lacking institutional support and often changing 
venues. Run, and largely financed, by Jarosław Kozłowski, it was a space 
that was put at the disposal of the invited artists without obliging 
them to adhere to any predefined agenda.

The documentary material presented at the Zachęta and in the 
accompanying publication offers an insight into artistic practices 
pursued outside the official, entrenched art system, beyond the axes of 
the centre/periphery divisions, into a vast area of artistic strategies 
developed at a small, alternative gallery collaborating with artists 
from all over the world despite functioning in the oppressive conditions 
of a communist state.

The titular ‘incorruptible eye’ refers to both vision and visibility. On 
the one hand, to vision that refuses to surrender to ideological 
pressures and commercial temptations and, on the other, to a blurring of 
distinctions between the visible and that which is expelled from the 
field of vision. Visibility resisting aesthetic or political preferences 
is but one way of reading the history of the Akumulatory 2. The 
documentation collected in the exhibition and catalogue, largely 
published for the first time, will facilitate a much more comprehensive 
reading of this history.