Zofia Kulik – Instead of Sculpture
1 October – 3 December 2016
Glasgow Sculpture Studios
At the Glasgow Sculpture Studios, they are showing what they describe as being ‘the first time that GSS have presented an historic work as part of its programme’. Instead of Sculpture was presented as Zofia Kulik’s graduation at the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw in 1971. It consisted of a slide presentation of around 400 images and an accompanying thesis. It has now been shown in its entirety as the artist had originally intended, but wasn’t able to due to a lack of printing facilities in Warsaw at the time. The main line of enquiry with Zulik’s work is asking questions such as ‘What is film? Space in time. What is Sculpture? Space in time. What is the difference? Film is sculpture in a linear form (of the film frames’.
This enquiry comes at the end of the 1960s, when artists were exploring ‘sculpture in the expanded field’, a term that was coined by Rosalind Krauss. Artists were going beyond the traditional accepted forms of sculpture, in search of a new language and asking questions such a ‘what is sculpture?’, leading to artists using performance and film in new and different ways.
What i find most fascinating about seeing this work, is that it is from behind the Iron Curtain during a time of Soviet communist rule and a taste of Socialist realism. Kulik was certainly no apologist for such a style. Laura Campbell describes this dichotomy in her review for the List:
‘The images themselves were made between ’68 and ’71, and show peculiar performative processes with odds and ends of materials used in diverse situations and locations: The transient and anarchic nature of the sequences can perhaps be seen as a direct refutation of the socialist realist style so prevalent in Poland at the time. This is an open-ended work that doesn’t set out to answer the question ‘What is the difference between sculpture and film?’ (Or the difference between something permanent and ephemeral) but which nonetheless has helped pave the way for generations of medium-defying artists.’
more image of the show can be viewed here