‘Even the thing I am ...’: Tadeusz Kantor and the Poetics of Being Martin Paul Leach Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, awarded by De Montfort University January 2012 Abstract This thesis explores ways in which the reality of Kantor’s existence at a key moment in occupied Kraków may be read as directly informing the genesis and development of his artistic strategies. It argues for a particular ontological understanding of human being that resonates strongly with that implied by Kantor in his work and writings. Most approaches to Kantor have either operated from within a native perspective that assumes familiarity with Polish culture and its influences, or, from an Anglo-American theatre-history perspective that has tended to focus on his larger-scale performance work. This has meant that contextual factors informing Kantor’s work as a whole, including his happenings, paintings, and writings, as well as his theatrical works, have remained under-explored. The thesis takes a Heideggerian-hermeneutic approach that foregrounds biographical, cultural and aesthetic contexts specific to Kantor, but seemingly alien to Anglo-American experience. Kantor’s work is approached from Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian perspectives that read the work as a world-forming response to these contexts. Read in this way, key writings, art and performance works by Kantor are revealed to be explorations of existence and human being. Traditional ontological distinctions between process and product, painting and performance, are problematised through the critique of representation that these works and working practices propose. Kantor is revealed as a metaphysical artist whose work stands as a testament to a Heideggerian view of human being as a ‘positive negative’: a ‘placeholder of nothing’, but a ‘nothing’ that yet ‘is’ … 2 CONTENTS Chapter 1. Introduction!8 Introduction!8 Tadeusz Kantor: a brief critical biography!9 Outline of Thesis!31 Chapter 2. The Literature and Discourse on Kantor!36 Introduction!36 Witkacy!70 Informe!74 The aims of this study!80 Chapter 3. The Ontological Context: Just "Pulling Faces at the Audience#? The Problem of Response to Kantor#s Work!82 Introduction!82 A critique of representation!84 The ethical implications of representation!88 The ἦ#$% (&thos) of human being!95 Memories as 'found objects(: the concept of memory in the light of the &thos of human being!98 Is Kantor really 'Pulling faces at the audience(?!109 Chapter 4. The Hermeneutic Context. Speaking a "Stammering Speech#: Tadeusz Kantor as Messenger!121 Introduction!121 The 'Little Manifesto(: A celebration of nothing!124 The voice of the artist!135 The misleading 'little child(!141 Conclusion: 'maturing into childhood(!144 3 Chapter 5. The Biographical Context. Kantor#s Anatomy Lesson: "Reality of the Lowest Rank# and the Biopolitics of Bare Life!148 Introduction!148 Informe and Informel!150 Negative ontology: Something for nothing—nothing as something?!170 Occupied Kraków: The reality of biopower!173 The reality of the 'reality of the lowest rank(!176 Negativity and humiliation: the inverted ontology of 'the thing I am(!179 Zo&, bios and 'bare life(!180 The representation of human being!185 'Letting Tattered Clothing Sing(: Tadeusz Kantor(s Anatomy Lesson and the 'reality of the lowest rank(!188 Chapter 6. The Aesthetic Context: The "Poor Object# as Icon!206 Introduction: Intimations of eternity!206 The temporal paradox of Kantor(s artistic development!209 The Suprematist zero—looking to the future or to the past? Suprematism Constructivism, and the critique of Euclidean space!218 A non-Euclidean alternative: The peculiar aesthetic of Byzantine and Russian icons!224 Pavel Florensky and the aesthetics of eternity: 'Reverse Perspective( and 'Reverse Time(!229 The emballage of the real: Florensky(s 'reverse time(!239 Kantor(s aesthetic of 'Poor Reality(!242 Chapter 7. The Metaphysical Context: Tadeusz Kantor as "Hunger Artist# in the "Poor Room of the Imagination#!260 Introduction: Thrown into the stanza of being!260 Human and animal being and their relation to finitude!263 On the threshold!268 4 'I(ve had enough of sitting in this painting. I(m leaving(!275 The 'Last Supper( in the 'Poor Little Room of the Imagination(: Kantor(s fatal return!279 Conclusion!280 Chapter 8. Conclusion: The "Being# Behind "Doing#!282 Appendix!289 1.1 The 1st Exhibition of Modern Art!289 1.2 Kantor(s published statements on the formation of Cricot 2 and the idea of 'autonomous theatre(!290 1.3 Cricot 2 productions toured following Kantor(s death!290 1.4 Nicholas Serota on Kantor(s reception in Edinburgh and London!291 1.5 The video archive of Kantor(s live work!291 1.6 Kantor(s theatrical objects and their 'second life( as art objects in gallery exhibitions!292 1.7 Material concerning Wielopole, Wielopole in Kantor 1984 and Kantor 1990 compared with that in Kantor 2004.!292 1.8 Kantor and Grotowski!293 1.9 Information given on the cover and title page of Kobialka(s A Journey Through Other Spaces (1993)!293 1.10 The Partitioning of Poland!294 1.11 Czes)aw Mi)osz(s account of Wyspia*ski(s straw man!294 1.12 Kantor and Tintin: an unexplored relationship!295 1.13 The Polish text of Raczek(s 1982 Polityka essay!296 1.14 Polish text of the reason Kantor was awarded the Rembrandt Prize !296 1.15 Orson Welles and Anthony Perkins on The Trial!297 1.16 Kantor and Edward Gordon Craig!297 1.17 Unpublished anonymous translation of a section of Kantor(s 'After the War: A Night Notebook or Metamorphoses (1947–1948)(!298 5 1.18 The reality of occupation as portrayed in Polanski(s The Pianist!298 1.19 Transcription from Kantor(s address at the Cricoteka, December 1987:!299 1.20 My translation of Kantor(s partytura for An Anatomy Lesson According to Rembrandt (1968)!301 1.21 Primo Levi(s account of the 'Special Squads( at Auschwitz!304 1.22 The problem of dating 'Klasa szkolna(!304 1.23 The similarity of the mannequins in The Machine of Love and Death to figures in Bauhaus, Futurist and Constructivist art.!305 1.24 The 1920s Bauhausbücher!305 1.25 Original Polish text for extract from Lesson 3 of The Milano Lessons!306 1.26 Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr.'s discussion of Brunelleschi(s 'reversed( visual pyramid!307 1.27 Antonova(s proposed new definition of 'reverse perspective(!307 1.28 MIKhIM and VKhUTEMAS!308 1.29 The Planty!308 1.30 Polish text from 'The Essential Meaning of the Theatre( in Theatrical Place!309 1.31 The venue of the first performance of The Dead Class!309 1.32 New scientific perspectives and twentieth-century Phenomenology !309 Bibliography!311 6 ‘EVEN THE THING I AM ...’: TADEUSZ KANTOR AND THE POETICS OF BEING […] Captain I’ll be no more; But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft As captain shall: simply the thing I am Shall make me live. […] (Parolles, All’s Well That End’s Well IV.iii: 312–315) Being held out into the nothing—as Dasein is—on the ground of concealed anxiety makes the human being a lieutenant of the nothing. (Martin Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics?’ 1998e: 93) 7 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION Introduction In his discussion of the difference between critique and commentary, in his 1924-1925 essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Walter Benjamin expresses the problem of dealing with an enigmatic subject: Let us suppose that one makes the acquaintance of a person who is handsome and attractive but impenetrable, because he carries a secret with him. It would be reprehensible to want to pry. Still, it would surely be permissible to inquire whether he has any siblings and whether their nature could not perhaps explain somewhat the enigmatic character of the stranger. In just this way critique seeks to discover siblings of the work of art. And all genuine works have their siblings in the realm of philosophy. It is, after all, precisely these figures in which the ideal of philosophy’s problem appears. (Benjamin 2004c: 333) It seems to me now, that drama, theatre, or even performance discourses, are not true siblings of Kantor’s work. As Kantor maintained, he was primarily an artist and the work that he produced was, for him, primarily a work of art in whatever form it took. As Benjamin points out, ‘all genuine works [of art] have their siblings in the realm of philosophy’ and I argue that Kantor’s work has its siblings in the realm of Heideggerian ideas, ideas that on the one hand reach back to revise the received interpretations of Aristotle, Plato and the Pre- Socratics, and on the other hand reach forward as the ground out of which the ‘continental’ philosophical strands of ‘post-structuralism’ and ‘deconstruction’ grew. In particular, one of Martin Heidegger’s ‘accidental’ students, the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, has developed a matrix of Heideggerian and Benjaminian philosophy that seem to me to resonate with Kantor’s work and ideas. These are ideas that raise fundamental questions concerning Being and beings, and of a certain sense of the nature of human being, the fragile and provisional nature of which is exactly what occurred to me on an afternoon in 1999 in Podgórze, a suburb of Kraków, where the German occupying force had confined Kraków’s Jewish population in 1941. Standing on 8 the site of the former dividing line that had separated the Jewish ghetto, from the side of the street where Kantor was at the time living as part of the Polish population was one of the seeds of this thesis. During subsequent trips to Kraków in which I researched the Podgórze ghetto and tried to establish Kantor’s movements and the reality of Kraków during the occupation, the inevitability of an ontological approach became more apparent.