Art on the brink, ergo the margin of life: Marek Chlanda’s The Tango of Death
Journal Title: Art Inquiry. Recherches sur les arts - Year 2014, Vol 0, Issue
Abstract
Marek Chlanda’s sketch Cosmos – Tango of Death was created as a picture of the artist’s yearning for sense. This sketch and the triptych are based on the photo from 1942 taken at the extermination camp in Janowska Street in Lvov. The photo shows a circle of musiciansprisoners, who play the Tango of Death on the SS-men’s order. The sketch quite accurately repeats the ‘composition’ of the photo. Here an artist puts the viewers in the face of the literal and metaphorical understanding of the marginal: the group of musicians is situated in the center of the drawing, but the margins of this work are filled with the artist’s notes. My reflections do not concern marginalization in general, but the marginalization of the artist and art on the brink of life, indirectly and probably briefly involved in the machinery of extermination. I want to reflect on the incredibility of the existence of art during the Holocaust. I analyze how contemporary artist tries to penetrate into that special event, through the thought and premonition of future, provoked by William Blake’s poems and drawings. The black and white photograph, which presents a group of musicians playing the Tango of Death is literally a representation of a segment of the circle of the camp orchestra, whose remaining fragment, invisible in the photograph, is located off the frame. On the other hand – it is symbolic because it documents the existence of this odd orchestra in the death camp and factually depicts its membership.
Authors and Affiliations
Eleonora Jedlińska
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP167081
- DOI -
- Views 141
- Downloads 0
Performance art, performativity and the issue of neomodernism
Body art and performance art are often discussed together, and even identified as the same thing. A careful analysis of these artistic trends and the accompanying theoretical commentary tends, however, to highlight their...
The margins of transcendence in contemporary art
According to the widespread opinion, contemporary art does not seek to express transcendent reality. Questioning this view, the author of the article examines two aspects of the problem. The first concerns the use of Chr...
Aesthetic Participation as a Realisation of Social and Cultural Poiesis
Abstract: In this essay, I will attempt to present a model of aesthetics based on a distinctive way of understanding artistic participation, relying on examples from the conceptions of Michel Maffesoli and Nicolas Bourri...
The Aesthetic and Material Implications of Ecoventions’ Ongoing Participatory Demands
In this paper, we assume that participatory art is an artwork, produced either collectively or by one artist, that invites participants to alter either its appearance, structure, and/or function, though not its purpose....
Idealistic Philosophy of Participation and Contemporary Art. Selected Examples of Polish Art at the turn of the Twenty First Century
The article begins with elements of the idealistic philosophy of participation. The introduction includes both Plato’s thought regarding the possibility of participating in the world of ideas and the concepts of being (i...