30 DADA pol itics

Has the cancer of rationalism eaten up your brain? There is an opportu-

nity for the lost
Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed t hat we should nd t he golden means bet ween
t he i ndi erence of t he origi nal human state and t he undefeated act ivit y of our
sel f-love. There was not hi ng about t he si mple state of utopia of nat ure, and what
was signi cant was rat her t he act ive role i n worki ng out a model of societ y t hat
would let us reform our customs and re-educate our senses. Nevert heless, his-
tory only gives a test i mony t hat whenever somet hi ng as technical as model is
to be appl ied, its executors seem to be forget t i ng t hat it used to be only model,
and t his f requent ly opens up t he road to abuse, i nat ion of power, and event u-
al ly to regi me.
Then, as i f si multaneously, i n l i ne wit h t he pri nciple of mut ual it y and com-
plementarit y of nat ure, somewhere on t he periphery t he germ of anot her force
is buddi ng: alternat ive and dynamic, f rivolous and untamed, chaot ic and i ncor-
rect. A force t hat exceeds t he l i mitat ions of models or commands, as it precedes
and t ransgresses t hem. Gushi ng here is t he spri ng of rebel l ion, a pre-expressive
element t hat wi l l oppose t he set st ruct ure of power. This rebel l ion, resistance,
and passion of f reedom is t he act ive energy. This is t he heart of counter-
cult ure and t he l i fe i nspi ri ng breat h of t he great Goddess Eris.
The Orange Alternat ive poi nts openly to its i nspi rat ion i n Dadaism and sur-
real ism. Wit h its ant i-st ruct ural and ant i-rat ional (or surrat ional i n t he case of
Marcel Duchamp) energy of t he element, has f requent ly provided t he source
of t he contemporary pol it ical happeni ng. From t he pre-war avant-garde it took
over t he poet ic of laughter, unl i mited f reedom i n expression of t houghts, scat h-
i ng wit, merci less i rony, and obviously provocat ion. Al l t hese to at tack i n any
manner possible t hrough t he absurd, past iche, grotesque, paradox t he dan-
gerously al ienat i ng power: of t he reason, of t he social st ruct ure, or t he order of
norms set i n stone. This precious energy of resistance t hat t he Orange Alternat ive
took over f rom t he Dadaists may not be lacki ng, and i f it ever happened so, peo-
ple would t urn i nto robots programmed to somebody elses wi l l, i nto external ly
cont rol led machi nes, devoid of wi l l and devoid of t hi nki ng. Therefore, i f anyone
feels t hat somet hi ng is goi ng t he wrong way, he can al ways reach for .
Furnished wit h t he pocket cosmodrome t hat we al ways have wit hi n our
skul ls, we have exami ned a handf ul of facts f rom t he border of history of ideas
and history of art to recognise t he archaeology of t he part icular phenomenon
t hat has gai ned bot h fame and recognit ion under t he name of t he Orange Alter-
nat ive. The colour wit h t he 255-165-0 carries an act ivat ion potent ial, and
laughter can t rigger a revolut ion.
32 DADA pol itics
, or Our appeal for the world to lie down in
a dream, and the dream in the world. Let everyone of you know that we will
not let anyone cheat us easily.
The leading principle of action art is the movement of thinking that opposes
the structure. This brings it close to the spirit of counterculture, present with-
out respect to time and place whether this is the 1967 Summer of Love in Cal-
ifornia, or May 1968 in Paris, or Wrocaw 1988. And (even though it is worth-
while) one does not need to know Richard Schechner to know that thestreet is
the stage, nor Sir Ralf Dahrendorf or Erving Gofman to have the feeling that
the main principle of explaining social facts today is their theatrical quality and
value of participation in a social Spectacle. Spectacle here is a metaphor of ex-
istence, much like Game or Dream. What is the truth and what an appearance,
what is reality and what is dream? Following the surreal fusion of dream and
wakefulness into a single surreality, one does not need to answer this dualistic
question any more. If we only learn to dream consciously. Down with symme-
try! Long live free imagination! We participate in this Spectacle, whatever its
valuation, and we can participate in its creation, creating new situations, other-
wise it is the Spectacle that will do us. The popular slogan the street belongs
to us assumed a more tangible form in the discourse of British activists: What
the Parliament did, the Street can undo. Possibly, to add quoting Konopnicka,
because whether you want it or not, there are dwarves in the world.
The lesson of taught through the mediation of the Orange Alter-
native teaches that action may be art, in which case it acquires higher ef-
ciency, independent from the place where the action takes place whether
in widnicka Street or in front of the White House, the Embassy of Belarus,
and in Tiananmen Square; during the Pride Parade, and at the Fascism shall
not pass rally, during the operation Follow the White Rabbit in Katowice and
at Halloween in New York. Whatever the scale of the operation and its precise
course, what is of key importance is the very manifestation of the transgressi-
ve energy of life, the joyful creative element that does not tolerate limitations.
The art of action, the unmediated and direct artistic operation is the expres-
sion of this very element.
Strangely enough, civic movements and artistic movements cannot often
be separated in a simple way. As Johan Huizinga, a classic scholar in the eld
of anthropology argues, play is the source of culture. It was so that something
extraordinary began from having fun together in a caf, from an independent
newsletter, and from happenings of the Movement of the New Culture. The Or-
ange Alternative is therefore to be analysed not as an art or creative activity, nor
as a political or civic movement, but rather in the context of art, and in the con-
text of politics. To quote the thinker and performer Jan widziski, author of
34 DADA politics
the theory of contextualism, in a lm devoted to action art: In certain context,
every type of action is a political.
1ns nn1 or oInsc1 nc1Ions, or the fox, the tiger, the badger, the bear.
Revolutionary Activist, poisonous toadstools, goldsh
Action art is not an invention of the avant-garde, and may be derived from the ac-
tions of Diogenes from the barrel, Chinese Taoist calligraphers, and the shaman
practices originating in traditional cultures from all over theglobe. It is the source
performance of life acted to the glory of the fullness of being. This creative act,
conceived as an event, is something at the same time very easy and very dif-
cult. Much like performance, action art is an opening of art to the everyday life
(Dziamski), art-life (Goldberg), and fullled action (Grotowski).
To examine the happenings of the Orange Alternative in the context of art,
it is necessary to dene the semantic eld. Usually, certain simplications are
made concessions mostly to art history as a science which dene the actions
performed in the context of art into types and subtypes, due to their form and
nature. This allows us to talk about happening, anti-happening, performance,
body-art, demonstration, and very many others, remembering that the so-called
borders between the arts (perceived usually as formal categories of the media of
communication) are uid and dened primarily by the context. It is the context
that allows identication of the various forms of human activity, and specical-
ly to diferentiate between arts of corresponding formal character (why not per-
formance, monodrama, and dance). Each of the notions has its own history and
a variety of semantic entanglements. Nevertheless, action art, which I dene as
the art of direct action allows attention focus on uniqueness of every human
action: its dynamic character, both internally and in its deep philosophical as-
sumptions. This approach is performative, spectacular, and theatrical, in thesame
sense in which theatron originates from the action of seeing. It is also the sensi-
tivity to the praxis, to the real multilevel efect, as if it would be followed by cer-
tain dissatisfaction with the verbal or declarative level, or withthe idea carried
above life lacking of the quality that is provided by embodiment.
It also used to be assumed that, as a life-art, performance has its modern
20th-century roots in the Petersburg constructivist Stray Dog Caf, in the fu-
turistic Synthesis Theatre, and in the actions in Zrich, Berlin, Paris, and
New York. To understand the deep grounds of the connections between Dada-
ism and the socially involved alternative artistic movements, one needs to take
into account the conclusions on the subject that have been worked out by the an-
thropology of art, and perceive the broad consequences of todays dadaist activ-
ity as an inuential pre-counterculture, anti-war movement and as involved in
far-going intellectual transformations. And because perceived somewhat
36 DADA politics
more broadly than just a phenomenon in the history of art is something ex-
tremely signicant for the subject of Orange Alternative that we are tackling, let
us follow the principle ab Iove principium and move to immediately to re-
call its origins.
, or Even Lenins novels are no match for a painting
All artistic revolutions begin in cafs, Tadeusz Kantor used to say. It was also
in this way that in well known circumstances the movement originat-
ed in Zrich in 1916. The multinational group of artists, predominantly poets
and painters, inaugurated the activity of a fellowship of such profound signi-
cance for the development of culture of 20th century (and possibly also for 21st
century) that this city of banks, watches, and Lenin may today boast the history
of a small yet inuential caf known as Cabaret Voltaire. We can only speculate
whether it was the name of the place that was to be considered critical towards
the rationalism presented by the author of LIngnu, or was it to make references
to the pitiless and mocking method of animating the intellect and spirit that this
dramatist worked out and applied to expose the hypocritical normality.
Nonetheless, the Dadaist launched by Tristan Tzara wanted from its begin-
ning to be abnormal and anti-rationalist, and to provoke actively and directly.
The denition of art that the dominant milieu of pretentious aesthetes used was
considered absurd and idiotic in the group gathered at the Cabaret Voltaire, and
all the theories of art and attempts at explaining artistic action were considered
uninteresting and antiquated. Nothing was left. Times of anti-art were proc-
laimed, as well as attitude of opposing all generally accepted opinions, equally
expert superstitions and popular superstitions. The function that art used to play
earlier was entirely lost. Such circumstances and this conviction needed con-
frontation. The Dadaist happeners believed that art has become solely an aes-
thetic pleasure based on arbitrary and unjust judgement of taste, which led to
a situation in which signicant for the reception of art was only admiration, and
thinking was no longer necessary at all.
For the Dadaists, the only answer to this callousness of the alleged sensitive
hard-headed people was the scandal. The method for achieving it was trans-
gression of customary norms, canons in artistic in painting and sculpture, and
non-artistic in life; through spontaneous direct action, a new and specical-
ly Dadaist form of art. The intolerable young provocateurs activists and art-
ists altogether were dangerous for every pre-established public order. And if
that order proved to be based on hypocrisy and duplicity, the fears of its guard-
ians were most justied. The group formed under the banner craved for
enlivening of the spirit and the intellect. Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hen-
nings, Jean Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Richter, were later joined by
38 DADA politics
others, including Max Ernst, Man Ray, the later pope of surrealism Andr Bre-
ton, and possibly the most radical of them Marcel Duchamp. They gatecrashed
events and pulled the legs of respectable professors, aged ladies, and perfectly
groomed youngsters. They provoked intellectually with their eccentric beha-
viour, not with aggression. When they organised an exhibition, you would enter
it through the toilets, to prevent all possibilities of the temple of art attitude,
in its institutional form. Before they were considered entartete Kunst (a degrad-
ed art) in the Third Reich, Dadaists exhibited pigs in Nazi uniforms in Munich,
to comment upon the political situation and provide the audience with a pretext
to a serious and immediate consideration who really are the politicians govern-
ing them. At the same time they painted moustaches on inviolable monuments
of culture.
This avant-garde approach of afecting the spectator with the form as well
as with the content of the message, with intelectual and sensual guerrilla, was
the inseparable companion of the movement and later of surrealists, but its
origin were in . At numerous exhibitions and meetings, in which the space
of the gallery was to be transformed into diferent world, the openings were
always happenings avant la lettre. People dressed as fantastic creatures were
walking the halls, naked women covered with seafood lolled on the tables, and
the musical landscape was constructed of pre-noise music of unidentied me-
tallic beats. The modernist desire for a future change, which an artistic action
may bring about, was broken with another performative and synchronous ef-
fect. The experience itself was becoming signicant, and so was the event, and
its transitory aspect, which Breton later named acte gratuit a unbiased act, gen-
erated from the inside. Externally, it triggered the desire for cognition, encou-
raged expectation of what the organisers were going to do this time. Would this
mean anything, would they say anything, or maybe they were going to dance and
sing phrases from Ubu Roi and play with words previously cut out from a news-
paper and randomly draw them from a hat stolen from the unknown gentleman.
In one of these exhibitions, the surrealist painter Max Ernst added an axe to
his sculpture, believing that if his art somehow hit the spectator, the spectatot
should also be able to hit it, so as to become united with the sculpture into a sin-
gle work in the wonderful act of creative destruction.
, or Even a single policeman in the street is a work of art
As it proved later, of key importance for the transformations of Dadaism and its
further development was the person of Marcel Duchamp. Following the great
succs de scandale in France with the painting Nude Descending a Staircase, con-
sidered a mockery of Cubism, the artist made the famous Duchamps gesture
in 1915. To knock the spectators out from the thoughtless and conservative
40 DADA politics
intellectual xation and to show the limitations of the recipients, Duchamp
proposed to the New York exhibition Armory Show a porcelain urinal, which he
entitled Fountain.
Much like the earlier Nude, this work by Duchamp was also rejected, yet
an intriguing discussion broke out around it, which was much more interesting
that the artefact itself. It was not so much the publicity of the scandal (although
we do not neglect it), but rather the agitation that produced the rhizomatic ef-
fect. Duchamps gesture could have been polysemantic, depending on the re-
cipients. It could turn the attention to the social role of the person traditional-
ly dened as the artist, to its semidivine power, but also to everything else that
was beyond the artist and what manifested in the mind of the spectator. It was
a surreal efect, active at the level of imagination. Through provocation, it could
disclose the superstitions of the recipient himself, his opinions about the sta-
tus of a work of art, artist and nally with all what was connected to the dom-
inant dualism of high and low culture. He could draw attention to the institu-
tion of the gallery, to the curators, and the criteria for the selection of works for
exhibitions, and to their hidden assumptions and limitations. It was achange of
focus from what is aesthetic and retinal, to what is intellectual and spiritual.
In this case inversely proportional to the ordinary character of the object itself.
The Fountain was also the rst ready-made in history, an object of everyday life,
which in certain circumstances becomes a work of art by the force of a gesture
(today this gesture can be construed as a contextual shift, thanks to the writings
of widziski). Or, possibly, one should say: it had been a work of art even ear-
lier, even though nobody noticed. The slogan of the Orange Alternative Even
a single policeman in the Street is a work of art makes a signicant contributi-
on to Duchamps gesture.
After Duchamps arrival in the , his art found fertile ground. Some were
still only shocked, but others began to take a closer look, and interpret what it
was actually all about. The New York began to develop, and so did its inu-
ence on art in the United States. And again, it became clear what a culture-form-
ing role can be played by these insubordinate European artists. Even though ex-
ternally, Duchamp himself dressed like a proper European gentleman, he was
nevertheless one of the most radical intellectual revolutionaries. He did not sport
green hair as Baudelaire did, nor walked an anteater on a leash like Dal. But
the answer to his presence in the United States came from the American angry
young men, unsatised with the state of the art and world, who did not hesitate
to reach for new, risky experiments in the search for the way out from the im-
passe. They were Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage.
The activity of Cage (born in 1912) was of key importance for the establishing
of happening as an artform. First, in 1948, together with Merce, Cunningham,
42 DADA politics
and Willem de Kooning, he worked on a pre-happening production of The Raft
of the Medusa to the music of Erik Sati. Later, in 1952 he performed the action
Theater Piece No. 1, which with time was considered the worlds rst happening.
Towards the end of the 1950s, in classes in experimental composition, Cage
together with his students from the New School examined action art as a form
of art that not only combined other media, but was also integrated with life and
with the process that a person operating in a given situation as an artist expe-
riences himself.
, or You know well that Imagination is an unlimited world
In 1957, at a spring picnic at his friends, Allan Kaprow (born in 1927), a student of
Cages from Black Mountain College, coined a term happening, and two years
later, i.e. in 1959, he performed the rst operation using that notion in New York.
It was remembered as 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, while Kaprows book Assemblage,
Environments and Happenings, published by Abrams in 1966, described his in-
vention and introduced other new forms in art, besides the happening, that have
survived to this day. Kaprow wrote, The term happening refers to an art form
related to theatre, in that it is performed in a given time and space. Its structure
and content are logical extensions of environments inuence. And: The term
environment refers to an art form that lls an entire room (or outdoor space)
surrounding the visitor and consisting of any materials whatsoever, including
lights, sounds and colour.
Following this and other experiments of Cage and Kaprow, and a group of
artists close to them, the neo-Dadaist movement known as Fluxus was born.
Ofcially, the rst concert of Fluxus was organised in Wiesbaden in 1962, with
the participation of, among others, John Cage, George Brecht, Yoko Ono, Dick
Higgins, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostel, and many other intermedia artists (term
coined by Higgins) combining experimental music and concrete poetry with hap-
pening and action. George Maciunas created the name Fluxus to dene move-
ment, ow, and life in opposition to stagnation, fossilisation, and deadness of
mental structures.
One cannot ignore the fact that at the same time when Kaprow invented
the happening, that is in 1957, the Situationist International was established in
France; its initiators, Guy Debord (born in 1931) and Ivan Chtcheglov (born in
1933), began to apply art as a political tool and embraced the neo-Dadaist tactic
of shock and cultural sabotage. It was a diferent form of social activism, refer-
ring to the modern anarchism and moving freely in the area of the art of life.
Another 20th-century source of action art is the gesture in action painting
of Jackson Pollock (born in 1912) and his abstractionist expressionism. Even in
the early 1940s, Pollock covered the canvas by pouring or dripping paint on it in
44 DADA politics
a one-man dance with the painting matter. He became acquainted with surreal-
ism and its ideas by the gallery that exhibited his works, and by his wife, the in-
uential artist Lee Krasner. On the continent, gesture painting was termed in-
formel, a name coined by Georges Mathieu in 1945. Another name of this type
of painting, originating from the French word for a stain, is tachisme.
In Poland, tachisme was practised by Tadeusz Kantor (born in 1915), who
went to the hells of his unconcious through informel painting, treated more
as a form of self-cognition than an expression of the person of the artist. Later,
Kantor began to bring informel into the theatre, using this way to paint costumes
and building a philosophy of new art. Art annexes life, he would say. In fact it
was an opening to the factor of chance, disclosing secret senses and the unor-
dered, dark side of reality, in which structures are crystallised from chaos, and
later become again dissolved into chaos.
1965 was the year of Cricotage, the rst happening in Poland that ended in
a scandal and dismissal of the gallerys director. Even though the intentions of
the artists were not political, the Communist authorities probably had to under-
stand Cricotage as aiming against the public order, incomprehensible for inter-
pretation, and moving, ergo dangerous to the stability of the system. The actions
that the happening was composed of (cutting hair, shaving, eating pasta, etc.)
were everyday activities transferred into the scene of artists caf, taken out from
their natural context and cast into the context of art, where they acquired new,
accidental, and unexpectable meanings.
Kantors happenings, besides the happening theatre that he ran at the time,
reinforced this medium in Poland. The photographs taken by Eustachy Kossa-
kowski at the Panoramic Sea Happening in Osieki in August 1967 became an icon
of these actions. The photograph shows a gure dressed as an orchestra con-
ductor standing on a rostrum going into the sea, with spectators behind him,
waves of the element in front of him, and baton in hand. The constituent events
of the Panoramic happening was The Raft of the Medusa based on Thodore Gri-
cault, which much like Cage and Satis spectacle made reference to the fa-
mous romantic painting. This rst ever large-scale attempt by any painter to
document a contemporary political scandal was reconstructed on the Baltic
beach and played out by a group of happeners in the presence of around 1000
spectators. The very scene presented in the painting by Gricault that provid-
ed the grounds for the action was connected to a tragic events from 1816, when
during the sea disaster of the Medusa, the ofcers (i.e. authorities) escaped in
lifeboats, leaving the passengers in the grips of death. They nevertheless built
a raft of their own accord, but out of the one hundred and fty passengers, only
fteen remained alive to testify to the truth. While painting, Gricault invited
his friends, including Eugne Delacroix, to be his models.
46 DADA politics
Kantor followed a similar path. In this way, which we nd of double signi-
cance, the Raft of the Medusa happening initiated the performance activity of one
of the most eminent representatives of action art in Poland Jerzy Bere (born
in 1930), a Krakow sculptor and hippie. In the context of actions which we are
discussing, Beres manifestations are rather to be associated with the non-ironic
approach, with their character being usually full of solemnity, as is emphasised
in the titles including The Mass, The Oracle, The Prophecy, reminding of priest-
ly, shamanistic, and magic actions. The artist usually performs them naked, em-
phasising in this way his sincerity, weaponlessness, and openness of intention.
Beres nakedness is connected to the nakedness of the hippies, yet there is a dif-
ference of efect. Similarly diferent is the nakedness of Ewa Partum from the fa-
mous photograph, in which she is standing in front of a uniformed police woman
armed in clothes. And even though parallels are tempting, they need not be
twisted action art is ruled by the logic of diference as well as by the logic of
similarity. Nakedness may be a means of revealing the fact that it is the emper-
or who is naked. Much like the dwarfs cap may show that the power held by
force is in fact devoid of reality.
svoIu1Ions or 1ns nnsnInc, or Darwin was a biologist and surrealist
The dwarf that migrated from Paracelsuss magic to the realm of collective imag-
ination was capable of leaping from the world of fairytales into the area of polit-
ical arts. The genealogy of the Dutch Provos movement and the Dwarven Party
suggests that the beginning occurred when the Dada-inspired Dutch countercul-
tural artist Robert Jasper Grootveld organised street happenings against smok-
ing tobacco in June 1964. His anti-smoking protests must have been so power-
ful and formally attractive that two hippie groups, also enthusiastic about street
demonstrations and inspired by what Grootveld was doing, began to collabo-
rate with each other. These were groups of pacists and anarchists gathered
together by Roel van Duijn, who joined their forces to protest jointly against
war, especially nuclear. The movement based its philosophy on Dadaist kernel
and its ideas on pacism and anarchism; in questions of customs it referred to
Marquis de Sade as a crucial thinker for the social theory of non-repressive cul-
ture formulated at the time by Herbert Marcuse. The term Provo, from which
the name of the movement originated, was coined by Wouter Buikhuisen, who
used it in his doctoral dissertation in 1965, where the term Provos dened
the young troublemakers. In 1967, performing a self-provocation, Provo dis-
banded, and to continue the actions of the unconventional activists Roel van
Duijn started another formation the Dwarven Party. This, as we know, directly
inspired the Orange Alternative. It also gave the Alternative its formal grounds:
the orange colour, the pointed dwarven cap, and the happening.
48 DADA politics
As has already been said, happening is one of the forms of art of direct actions,
which usually involve the presence of the performer with his corporality being
felt by the spectators and co-participants. Possibly, it is the question of presence
that is one of the reasons for the great efciency of the actions of the Orange
Alternative, its popularity and inuence on actual political change in Poland.
With my own person, I stand up to manifest something, with my very exist-
ence in a given place and time I speak out, I stand up for something or against
something. This is an efect that is primarily performative. For the real presence
to be possible to quote Bere the artist of manifestations it is necessary to get
to know the existing reality, preceding the act of carrying out the given perform-
ance, and the creation of an internal report from that reality. In the case of
the Alternative, sometimes it was just the participation in the happening that
created a possibility of making such a report from reality by its participants,
co-participants, and the audience. As an action in the context of art, the happen-
ing was beyond the limits of interpretations controlled by the communist sys-
tem, and therefore developed a distance necessary for free interpretation. Street
actions involving large groups of people in one joyful event gave the co-par-
ticipants an opportunity to feel that reality and to break the fear of repression.
Sometimes the border of power and authority was dened directly by the end
of the police baton and the range of the police water cannon. Yet the very expe-
rience of joint participation in as the Orange called it Karnawa RIO-Botnic-
zy (a play on words with robotniczy meaning workers, and Rio, the capital of
the carnival; translators note) was to reinforce the need for freedom and inde-
pendence. What comes to mind is the question asked by Mirosaw Pczak, who
must have been the rst to show the Orange Alternative in the anthropological
context: Can a revolt be a celebration?
Following the history of the happening, which in the rst period of its existence
was primarily focused on the cognition and secondly on the efect, the Orange
happening provided an opportunity to see how far one could go with the com-
munist authorities, and at the same time to what degree the minds of the pas-
sers-by fellow citizens in the shared police state were captive or free. From
the beginning of the happening, the need to experience the reality, the need to
examine the border between ction and reality was linked with the sense of
a crisis of this reality. Frequently, the happening rst served to detect the cri-
sis and then to overcome it.
The happenings performed in the 1980s by Major and friends difer from
the actions of other purely artistic groups (as the Academy of Movement) and
from the operations undertaken by individual artists using an event or perform-
ance for expression and communication. To perceive how thecontext of the his-
tory of Polish and global action art can expand our understanding of it, one needs
50 DADA politics
to plunge into the fascinating tale of discoveries made by independent artists,
their adventures, struggles and choices. And rst of all, to understand the logic
that gave birth to both Dadaism, situationists, Kabouters (dwarves), the Move-
ment for New Culture, and the Gallery of Manic Actions of the Orange Alterna-
tive from d.
, or Under the sun. Even a dried-up insect enjoys itself.
The word that the artists of the Cabaret Voltaire chose for the denition
of the movement means yes, yes in Russian, while in Romanian it is no, no.
The logic of the happening projects of the Alternative seems to be simple, yet it
similarly remains a paradox. It is the logic of a proof that is not straightforward,
and is also known as an apagogic or Socratic proof. It is at times referred to as re-
ductio ad absurdum: bringing down to opposition. Following the nimble formu-
la of Bartek Chaciski, who wrote about other Dadaists after Dadaism, the peo-
ple of the alternative of the time of globalism, the Yes-men: instead of beating
you up, they yes-yes you up.
The logic that corresponds with this is manifested in the context of the dou-
ble performance of Elbieta Cielar and Emil Cielar (born 1934 and 1931 respec-
tively) entitled Dobrze/Staczyk and produced in 1977. The project made refer-
ence to the contrast between the interior and exterior, and alluded to the his-
torical painting by Jan Matejko presenting the sad Staczyk Stanisaw Gska,
the jester of three Polish kings, who was the informal commentator on their ac-
tions. After a nished performance, sad Staczyk is sitting in an armchair and
pondering (tradition says: over the fate of the Fatherland but we shall be more
general, saying: that it aint good.). Emil Cielar, dressed as Staczyk, standing
on a ladder with a cartoon speech bubble saying Dobrze (which can be trans-
lated as its ), commented with his performance both on the political and ar-
tistic situation, showing the diference between meaning and sense in art under
the rule of censorship. It also marks the tension between the double game and
the deep game of life. The Cielars frequently operated on the border of politics
of artistic experience, aesthetics, politics, and the bond between ideology and
art, creating, for example, a project of an alternative Polish pavilion at the Ven-
ice Biennial, where they presented Polish independent art along with the civic
proposals of the Workers Defence Committee (). Remaining in this climate,
but also making references to Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Abbie Hofman, Guy De-
bord, was a number of later works of the Cielars, which were presented at their
retrospective exhibition at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Warsaw, entitled
Anarchia. Repassage. The Cielars attempt to exist without the state remains
a signicant idea to this day, as it was based on the desire to create situations
favouring intensive coexistence of individuals.
52 DADA politics
A oIrrsnsn1 suevsnsIon, or We have prepared for your ordered infor-
mation extremely perdious tricks. Do not count on them.
The Orange happeners, much like situationists, Provos and other Dadaists after
Dadaism before them, based their operations on the powerful logic of reductio ad
absurdum. Besides other creative poetics and logics, it is a distinct and sophisti-
cated surrealist technique (sometimes purely subversive, and at times absolutely
non-confrontational), recalling a double (and sometimes triple) game. It is a tech-
nique which combines involvement and distance, heat and cold, in avery subtle
formal combination. Usually behind it stands a very complex creative drama, be-
cause even though it seems that such subversive forms are frequently used today,
I wouldnt like to reduce them to pure irony only. In somewhat more rened form,
it is successfully used by a number of artists, mostly performers, among whom
worth mentioning are Cezary Bodzianowski and Oskar Dawicki, but one could
also speak of it in reference to the theatre of Piotr Bikont, and the painting of
Andrzej Urbanowicz from the series Letters to Eris.
A similar poetics, making reference to countercultural ways of dealing with
censorship applied by the dominant current, can be perceived in the happening
techniques of the Orange Alternative, in the texts of its yers, manifestoes, and
the scenarios for its operations. The generally known motif of the absurd that
provides food for thought, a model of provocation in thoughts, acquires a more
subtle extension in the form of a multi-level message. It is preceded by the phase
of disorientation, of profound importance for the efciency of the communi-
cation itself. Its essence is purposefully mistaking the tracks, being cast into
the deep water of meanings, and triggering the message: cope on your own,
read the context. In the happenings organised by the Orange, the purposeful
change of the context and shift of senses may be signicant: giving away scarce
toilet paper, organisation of the Eve of the October Revolution, and announcing
the slogan Free Isaura, after the authorities imprisoned another group of oppo-
sition activists in the wake of civic protests. Today, a signicant part of the
culture, efciently competing with the ideologies of mainstream and structures
of the reality of semi-products, thoughtlessness and haste, is based on a similar
communication technique.
In a situation of groups non-violence principle and the obvious threat from
the police, the happenings of the Orange Alternative must have been discussed
and prepared in detail. Potential reactions of the authorities and the behav-
iour of the security services had to be analysed; the entire dynamic course of
the event needed thinking through. Circumstances imposed necessity of nd-
ing other, artistic, imaginative and intellectual ways of opposing abuse, to nd
them in the spirit of developing alternative culture which resisted dominant
54 DADA politics
model, through actions of performing arts. The major predecessors and inspir-
ers operating on the border of neo-avant-garde theatre and anthropological stud-
ies were Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwik Flaszen with the idea of active culture.
This idea and the activity of Grotowski were of profound resonance in the cul-
ture-forming milieu of Wrocaw, known as the theatrical capital of Poland,
where the founders of the Orange Alternative were studing. Grotowskis work
in the middle of the 1980s, co-creating the so-called Second Reform of the The-
atre, and inspired by spiritual revolutionaries of the like of Stanislavsky and
Artaud, was focused primarily on performance art, yet perceived diferently
than in visual arts. The paratheatrical actions of the Workcenter in Pontedera
(focus on intense technical development work, involvement of theentire human
being in practices and exercises integrating the person and regaining the body)
attracted many and radiated not only to Wrocaw and Poland but much further
aeld. The art of Grotowski, experimenting with the anthropological theatre
in an area totally alternative to the mainstream, was initially formed as a thea-
tre laboratory, and later it developed into a paratheatrical ritual workshop with
performative actions.
Similarly Bere, one of the most active Krakow hippies and an avowed paci-
st, in his mystical manifestations explored the spiritual territories of develop-
ment of the human being and potential of communication with others. Aldona
Jawowska, the author of the famous Drogi kontrkultury (The Roads of Counter-
culture), showed a number of parallel activities at the time of the most inten-
sive operation of the Orange Alternative, listing in a single breath: Grotowskis
Laboratorium Theatre, Pracownia Olsztyska, Action Group from Toru and
Bydgoszcz, the Gardzienice Theatre, and the Repassage Gallery; and describing
them as: more than theatre.
Yet events in the microscale could play a signicant role in the transforma-
tion of consciousness. The Cielars organised ritual tea parties that need to be
treated from the perspective of time as independent works of art. The phrase of
the Kwiek/Kulik duo associated with the Gallery, saying that you are an art-
ist of behaviour, tells us much about how they ran the Repassage Gallery in
19701977 in the spirit of Oskar Hansens Open Form theory and new formula of
direct presence in culture. Shifting the point of semantic gravity, the claim re-
sulted in a fusion to use a simplication of the artistic approach to everyday
life and the lifes approach to art (I intentionally use the term approach in-
stead of confrontational notions such as strategy), taking its root in the1970s.
In the following decade the approach showed itself through operations of the like
of Cielars Dobrze/Staczyk, vested with new creative, anarchist energy, orig-
inating from the Erisian spirit of objection, which is usually manifested in
the form of a trickster or jester. The dwarf of the Orange Alternative is obviously
56 DADA politics
a political trickster, yet all art associated with the intention of social efect seems
to have tricksters qualities.
srrIcIsn1 InvoIvso nc1Ion, or Love, if spontaneous, is not discouraged
by any barrier.
The subject of art and activism is too broad and entangled, yet if we have men-
tioned the efect of the Orange Alternative and the efciency of these forms of
happening, as well as their translation into reality, it will be necessary to exami-
ne the details of the efciency of performance itself, to avoid misunderstandings.
The history of the happening gives evidence that a real action should not be con-
sidered more valuable (i.e. more efcient) then an imagined event that has not
been externaly executed. This may be easily understood if one examines the ev-
olution of the artistic activity of the author of the notion of happening, Kaprow,
who, at a certain point in time, practically ceased any external actions in favour
of conducting internal ones. The criterion for judgement may be the actions level
of intensity in experiencing causation and its as we would say today rhizoma-
tic quality (to what extend it moves the network of mutual combinations of signs
and events, how much it consctucts senses, and to what level it forms asingula-
rity). Personally I conrm Kaprows opinion saying that performance which is
not executed but experienced internally can have a powerful real efect.
Therefore, happenings of the Orange Alternative performed only conceptu-
aly or verbaly may also become interesting. Performance, as mentioned, usu-
ally roots in presence, albeit it is not a necessary condition of it. The concei-
ved and the embodied are dimensions of one single reality. Following the psy-
choanalyst approach of Julia Kristeva: a metaphor becomes a metamorphosis
through the growth of intensity and condensation of meanings. Categories be-
come blurred. Yet the experience remains. The virtual and the real are no long-
er a pair of oppositions. In this case, the question arises how to evaluate the ef-
iciency of social actors. Which one would be more inuencial: the one, whose
direct action has a visible external efect, or the one whose non-action but pow-
erful internal transformation results in a movement efecting the entire network
of senses (as in the buttery efect). It is rather a provoking problem and not ori-
ginal (something similar to a dillema What to use: sword or pen). Sometimes
one simply needs to move and to do something with his presence; personally
and performatively. This may be worth remembering, especially today, when so
much can be done with a single movement of a nger on the mouse. The source
of movement, therefore, lays elsewhere.
Possibly some of the actions of Orange Alternative, too risky or too dras-
tic in confrontation with the police, considered potentially inefcient and for
that reason abandoned, should be included in a full curriculum of the groups
58 DADA politics
art. Performative approach enables this kind of treatment. Evidence prove that
the efect of the actions of the Orange Alternative was frequently laying in a very
signicant transformation of feelings, a transformation of anger and fear of
the Communist system into a joyful protest activating laughter. Major Fydrych
and his legions of dwarves convinced them that the situation was bad but not se-
rious. Just two years later, communism collapsed entirely. Theworld was shocked
with the pace of its fall. Nevertheless, that fact should not have been even a bit
surprising for anyone who ever saw, heard or experienced the Orange Alterna-
tive in its operations.
, or The only solution for the future and today is Surrealism.
There are questions that should not be avoided and must turn up in this text.
What can the Orange Alternative signify to these historians, anthropologists and
other researchers who know the subject only from its documentation, traces of
actions, or from records provided by oral history? What might the Orange Alter-
native mean in the future, and what forms of operation that it worked out can re-
main something more than just precious record of the past? Is there something
more? What do the signs suggest? Future inquiry is vital, contextual as well as
specicating and positioning examination. The interpretation of the archaeolo-
gy of the Orange Alternative and its relations to other artistic creations involves
opening of the path to acknowledge signicant diferences, portraying the art
of action in its more radical political forms that correspond to todays potentials
and circumstances, as well as to regard artists focused entirely on the politics
of internal experience and its efectiveness.
The actions of the Orange Alternative may also provide the grounds for fur-
ther interests in the context of actual discourse about grassroots movements
and self-organisation. Employing performative experiences of counterculture
enables to develop new forms of social interaction, based on the desire to cre-
ate situations that favour an intensive coexistence of individuals. These forms
designed in the post-productive communications society would probably have
to be more subtle and more sophisticated than in times of communism or even
in consumptionist phase of neoliberalism. Yet it may draw from the Orange
Alternatives approach, and from its means of participation and engagement.
The so-called workers of art and areas of their operation, including the social
context of art, political art, aesthetic politics, and collectivism are inscribed in
the formula of applied social arts in Poland, developed during the evolution of
counterculture, and its development in the art of the 1970s. Primarily through
the contextual art of widziski, to which for unknown reasons todays art-
ists unfortunately dont refer too often. Because of that, the question of what
does art do? receives a too narrow interpretation in the circumstances where
60 DADA politics
its role in the capacity of a means for transforming the internal experience is
marginalised, and its function in the public dimension may often be limited to
setting certain political and social questions dened by the system of cultural
management and nancing. This is the reason why I tried to emphasise the anth-
ropological efect of the happenings harmonizing the social and the psychologi-
cal aspect into a continuum of mutual interdependence.
At the performative level, when a big group of people goes out into the street,
the situation of a spectacle the S situation (S for spectaculum) automatically
develops. The participants know that they would be seen, and the gaze of the wit-
nesses adds energy and charges their actions with meaning. The action of set-
ting the main point of attention was the beginning of all happenings the Orange
Alternative. It was followed by the polarisation between the group of happeners
and the group of spectators, which was later to be abandoned to involve activity
of the co-participants to play the leading role in the event. This is a basic struc-
ture of involving the passer-by and a phenomenology of a majority of Alterna-
tives surreal-like happenings.
Initiated by a historian, the Orange Alternative can be considered a move-
ment aware of the history of the avant-gardes with all their political and so-
cial entanglements: from the futurists support of fascism, anti-fascist activi-
ty of the Dadaists, communist engagement of the Surrealists, and anarchism of
the situationists and the Provos. This awareness built a distance towards politics
as such, and connected the Alternative to other movements referring sceptically
to all the forms of power games. This is why the initiative of a group of friends
from Wrocaw purposefully based on ambiguity, not only due to censorship intro-
ducing the dissociating of meaning, and blurring. Its achievements such as tac-
tical frivolity and its efect on the existential plane are hard to overemphasise.
The appearance of dwarves in the street, their operation, and their disappearan-
ce, it was leaving the spectators with a strange feeling of nonsense. Moreover,
they provoked a consideration of what the cause of this feeling is: the break-
ing of the rules or the experiencing of the illusion of stability and stagnation.
This is the efect: being kicked out of the groove, a provocation that makes
use of surreal poetics.
1ns mns or sunnsnIIsm, or Let us not be afraid to be honest to theend.
It is very important to remember that the notion of surrealism, used in the con-
text of the Orange Alternative, was applied to express strangeness, unusual, un-
real and fantastic character of an object, and this was the rst and basic mean-
ing of it. In this sense a term surrealism is used in common language. When
writing his introduction to the Anthology of Surrealism, Adam Wayk did not
omit this point.
62 DADA politics
As mentioned before, the notion of surrealism was used by the happening art-
ists in an unorthodox manner, and frequently had nothing to dowith the philos-
ophy of integrated reality postulated by Andr Breton, combining thedream and
wakefulness into a single superreality. It was rather a mask used to remain spon-
taneous, and a way of undercover criticism. Still in 2004, Fydrych spoke about
expansion of surrealism, when pointing on theadvancing disorder in the eld of
politics and corruption. It hardly had anything to dowith surrealism in the strict
sense, but provided bases for associating it with the meaning that the colloquial
language gave it. Calling something absurd (as in the sentence one absurdity
was chasing another) served emphasising the resistance against the reality of
the regime. It was alike with the expression of the happening of everyday life in
Poland, which was linked to the happeners experiences from their activities in
which a basic scheme of interactions with the police was established: the harsh-
er the police reaction, the more ridicule its efects. The most famous example of
this was during the famous stoping of ination by the police. (During the acti-
on police started chasing an object with The Ination inscription on it, which
was passed by the crowd from hands to hands, and nally halted by theofcers.)
When saying that there are better happenings in the parliament than the oper-
ations of the Orange Alternative, Fydrych ironically pointed to the spontane-
ous character and the improvisation of what politicians do instead of work-
ing. The verbal puns, its transversal character (doubletalk), allowed sincerity and
critical directness, which would otherwise have been repressed. Thelanguage is
at the service of intention, and not the other way round, while some categories and
words retain their exibility and internal versatility which theartists frequent-
ly nd highly suitable. This is also a reference to social stereotype of an artist as
the other, a weirdo, a madman. Yet, there is a method in this madness.
, or Which of the philosophers, Im seriously asking, would dare
say about the being from I think therefore I am I enjoy therefore I am?
Mohandas Gandhi, the most famous promoter of nonviolence, once said, Be
the change that you would like to see in the world. In the process of crystal-
lisation of the common dream about a world that we desire, it is predominant-
ly the internal practice that seems be signicant; nevertheless, there are situ-
ations when one must suspend the non-action and perform an action efcient-
ly and with joy.
When asked about counterculture in Poland, Krzysztof Lewandowski, a wri-
ter and owner of legendary publishing houses Empty Cloud and Flying Kite,
said the source of political happening lies in the ridiculous character of power.
The more ridiculous it is, the more intensive the political happenings. This is
just the point.
64 DADA politics
The Orange Alternative are the yes-men of Solidarity, uncompromising pro-
vocateurs, intelligent enough to apply the method of non-violence and to achieve
measurable efects. In this sense, they are konkretny people in the sense
given to the term by Padraic Kenney, writing about the Carnival of Revolution
in Eastern Europe. His book analyses the actions of involved alternative ar-
tistic movements in the entire region, groups that used laughter to defend free-
dom in Wrocaw, Lviv, Leipzig, and Teplice. The author points out the exceptio-
nal social efectiveness and the political results of these actions achieved mostly
by unconventional artistic forms, opening to social communication and direct
manner. According to the American researcher, the happenings of the Orange
Alternative and paralel groups had a signicant inuence on the process of his-
torical change of the political systems. Carnival, which Kenney perceives accor-
ding to Bakhtins theory, proves a strong inuence of countercultural activities
of the Orange Alternative, as well as activities of the Czechoslovak John Len-
non Peace Club, and the Peace and Human Rights initiative in East Germany.
Today, these actions can be examined in the eld of the anthropology of per-
formance, and compared to the recent political happenings, like happenings
against the politics of Bush or Kaczyski, or performances of the Free Hemp
Movement, which can be a great example of initially small and local inuen-
ce group gradually expanding their impact on social awareness. Isnt the Spirit
of Rebellion eternal? The Orange Alternative is , and as Tzara once wrote,
Dada is political.
1ns cIosInc, or Let no one dare argue with the last sentences. no ons.
No one is allowed. No one.
Although is habitually associated with the nonsense, it should be linked
with the paradox instead. The power of familiarity is mistakenly trying to con-
vince us that we live in a certain dualist system: nonsense sense, from which
there is no way out. In this juxtaposition, it is the nonsense that follows the sense,
yet let us not be so scrupulous in repeating this doubtful hierarchy. For it seems
that it is rather the sense that originates from nonsense, much like everything
that is generated from chaos, and not the other way round. sounds child-
ish, because it has a quality of being primal, close to the beginnings. It draws its
power from the frivolity pitted against the structure of mature shells and masks
of personas. Sense is connected with reason, understanding, logic and order;
like in expression to make sense where it manifests in a singular form. Alter-
natively, the senses are multiple. The artist introduces the new and uncom-
mon, adds something to the resources of culture, transforms and enriches it, and
therefore acts in accord with the principle of n1+n (where n1 stands for remov-
al of the present order of ideas, +n is the enriching element).
66 DADA politics
A situation of multiplicity is developed, no longer dominated by asingle sense,
but the plurality of senses, the sensory and aesthetic fusion of signals. Nonsense
serves a cause that makes sense, is present on the surface of the event, denes it
formally, yet in the background of the action there is a political diference, and
it is that diference which denes the context. The context may be a reference
to the alternative, to what is diferent (to other texts). From that multiplicity on
a higher level of complexity a quantum leap can be made into the new experien-
ce of sens. The sense crystallises for a moment, acquires a form and is dissolved
again, into the joyful chaos of multiplicity, from which another structure will
be formed and a new alternative will be born.
I. All the quotes dividing the text into modules come from Waldemar Major Fydrychs Manifesto
of Socialist Surrealism.
2. See: Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens. Zabawa jako rdo kultury, transl. by Maria Kurecka, Witold
Wirpsza, Warszawa I985. I will add that, contrary to some opinions, it seems that the Orange
Alternative has its source in the meetings in the club Indeks (fun) and in happenings (performance
art), and the gesture of painting dwarves on the white spots with which censors covered the slogans
of the opposition came second.
3. The Diferences, a documentary lm prodused in Poland in 2007, 50, dir. by Jan Przyuski. There is no
space here to dene what politics is for widziski and for his particular understanding of the nature of
politics, so in these matters I need to refer you to the higher doctoral thesis on widziski currently being
written by Kazimierz Piotrowski, and primarily to widziskis book Art, society and selfconciousness,
Calgary I979.
4. Grzegorz Dziamski, Performance, czyli otwarcie na codzienno ycia, [in:] Awangarda po awangardzie,
Pozna I995; Roselee Goldberg, Performance Art. From Futurism to the Present, 2nd ed. expanded and
edited, London New York I988 (Ist ed. I979 titled Performance: Live Art. to the Present); Jerzy
Grotowski, Teksty z lat , ed. by Janusz Degler, Zbigniew Osiski, 2nd ed. expanded and edited,
Wrocaw I990.
5. See: Leszek Kolankiewicz, Eleusis. Oczy szeroko zamknite, [in:] Midzy teatrem a literatur. Ksiga
oarowana Profesorowi Januszowi Deglerowi w . rocznic urodzin, ed. by Jan Miodek, Adolf Juzwenko,
Wrocaw 2004, pp. 3I9I.
6. See e.g.: Crisis and the Arts. The History of Dada, ed. by Stephen C. Foster, New York London I996.
7. See: Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, transl. Ron Padgett, London I97I, pp. 4344.
8. Many years after the historical Dadaism, the precursor of performance, Zbigniew Warpechowski,
showing the uncompromising character of performance art and radical qualities of truth, made
a performance in which he also exhibited an axe, yet it was he himself who was seated on a chair in
the place of a sculpture.
9. Let me add that the authorship of the anonymous article that caused the scandal has not been determined
to this day; The Richard Mutt Case was written most probably by Beatrice Wood or something which
cannot be excluded by Duchamp himself.
I0. Quoted from: Adrian Henri, Environments and Happenings, London I974.
II. I wrote about this in the brief history of performative actions in Poland entitled Sztuka akcji, Supsk
2007.
I2. Klara Kemp-Welsch, Zrozumie manifestacje Beresia, [in:] Jerzy Bere. Sztuka zgina ycie / Art Bends
Life, catalogue of an exhibition at Krakows Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery, Krakw 2007,
p. 25.
I3. Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution. Central Europe , Princeton 2002. Note also the work by
Lisiunia A. Romanienko, Antagonism, Absurdity and the Avant-garde. Dismantling Soviet Opression
through the Use of Theatrical Devices by Polands Orange Solidarity Movement, International Review
of Social History 2007, No. 3, pp. I33I5I. It is a part of the lengthier publication Humour and Social
Protest, ed. by Dennis Bos, Marjolein tHart, Cambridge 2008.
I4. Jerzy Bere, a video recording of an interview, Ustka 2007, from the authors archive.
68 DADA politics
I5. Mirosaw Pczak, The Orange Ones, the Street, and the Background, Performing Arts Journal, I99I,
Vol. I3, No. 2, pp. 5055. Although Karnawa Rio-botniczy was the name of a happening held on I6th
February I988, I would like to use the context for denition of a broader happening phenomenon.
I6. See: Happening, czyli o realnoci, prba hermeneutyki akcji Tadeusza Kantora i jego myli o kryzysie
formy /kryzysie realnoci, [in:] Sztuka akcji, op. cit., p. I2.
I7. See: Elbieta Cielar, Dzika lewica, anielscy anarchici, [in:] Elbieta i Emil Cielarowie. Anarchia.
Repassage, ed. by Maryla Sitkowska, Warszawa 200I.
I8. Escravara Isaura, (The Slave named Isaura) was a Brasilian soap opera broadcasted at that time by Polish
state television and an extremely popular.
I9. The inuence was noticed by Pczak in The Orange Ones, the Street, and the Background, op. cit.
On active culture see: Leszek Kolankiewicz, Na drodze do kultury czynnej. O dziaalnoci Teatru
Laboratorium w latach , Wrocaw I978.
20. In I986, Grotowski moved to Pontedera in Italy, but his work at the Workcenter and the Laboratorium
Theatre in the I970s and the rst half of the I980s formed an independent approach in the following
years, as it was founded on building a powerful base on the grounds of theatrical practice combining
esoteric work with personality development. See: L. Kolankiewicz, Na drodze do kultury czynnej, op. cit.
2I. Aldona Jawowska, Wicej ni teatr, Warszawa I988.
22. The person let us bring to mind again the Warsaw performers, the Kwieks behaves always and
everywhere, his being assumes a certain form dependent on multiple factors, which he may control
and shape. This is true both about art and life. Everyone is an artist of behaviour; or, rather, should be
one. This is the live art, from: Jan Przyuski, Performance, historia i gest, an unpublished text, in
the materials of the Institute of Polish Culture of the University of Warsaw.
23. Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, New York I966.
24. Performer Zbigniew Warpechowski developed a notion of the moment Zero: the key point for the whole
event which may occur before, during or after the action. See: J. Przyuski, Sztuka akcji, op. cit.
25. Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post, quoted from: Waldemar Fydrych, ywoty Mw
Pomaraczowych, Wrocaw 20I0.
26. In an interview, Ludwik Flaszen, co-creator of the Laboratorium Theatre, formulated a precious
remark, namely that in socialism one needed to ght against external enthralment. Capitalism is less
dangerous. In a free state, where you dont go to prison for your views, where anything can be said and
done, one needs to struggle with internal limitations and nd a smart answer to the question what to
do with freedom. Otherwise, it may prove great boredom, quoted from: Gazeta Wyborcza (Bydgoszcz),
29th June 2007.
27. Artur mijewski, Stosowane sztuki spoeczne. Manifest, [in:] Krytyka Polityczna nr II/I2, 2007, pp.I424.
28. M. Pczak, The Orange Ones, the Street, and the Background, op. cit., See also: L. A. Romanienko,
Antagonizm, absurd i awangarda, op. cit., and: Humour and Social Protest, op. cit.
29. According to Naomi Klein, The Yes Men continue the cultural strategy of Jonathan Swift and other
scathing satirists. In the history of anti-globalism no Molotov cocktails have been thrown as accurately
as the satire of the Yes Men. Quoted from: Bartek Chaciski, Atak ludzi na Tak, Przekrj weekly, 2004,
No. 47, pp. 5I53.
30. P. Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution, op. cit. Kenney builds the notion of konkretny people, speaking
about people with an initiative: activists of the alternative stage of the Eastern Bloc.