In the Imagination Room on Sienna Street in Krakow, Poland
[ A&B 9'2019 original material]
Whenever the phone rings from Krakow, I feel that it will be interesting. Well, and so it was this time, too: lo and behold, as a result of this nice phone call, today I am sitting in an armchair in the Kocievian countryside and writing a column for A&B. Great! I am immediately reminded of the wonderful time of guest lectures at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and the atmosphere of that one day, which I always reserved for urban exploration.
I remember the forenoon when I climbed the wooden stairs to the attic of Tadeusz Kantor's atelier in the tenement house at 7 Sienna Street (actually the Small Market). There are a lot of sacred places in Krakow, I thought, but this one here I'm curious about like none before. Kantor has always had the power to release emotions over me, so now, counting the last steps leading up to his most private place, I felt my emotional vulnerability.
But in the studio - turned into a gallery - hung framed and glass-framed small drawings by Kantor. In their own way, my favorites, but now I was looking at them... and not seeing them. I was looking around, drawing in air, looking for traces, old nails in the wall, still hammered in by Kantor's hand. The lady from Cricoteka who opened the gallery door for me, I asked a lot of questions: did she know Kantor? what was he like in rehearsals? what was he like in life? what was it like when he lived here? My lack of focus on the exhibition's drawings was probably evident, because after exchanging a few sentences I heard:
- Follow me. You will see something that will interest you.
In the hallway, she stopped at a dark door. She put her hand on the handle. She turned the key in the lock. The hinge squeaked, light came into the hallway.
- This is where he lived. This is his room. Everything stands as it stood.
I felt a tightness in my throat. Ah, the window, by it a table with two chairs, cabinets, a bed, a book on the dresser - watching all this is like talking. I walked up to the window.
- He was looking at the Dominicans, I thought out loud, seeing the monastery and its gardens from above.
- And he said it must be boring for them.
- And didn't he feel like one of them here?
- Well, that's what his Little Room of Imagination is.
We fell silent.
- I'll leave you alone for a bit.
I sat down on a chair. Alone-one-on-one with Kantor. Only after some time did emotion begin to merge with orderly thoughts. Here I was in a place that one of the greatest artists of the 20th century had built for himself, or rather set up with furniture. The bed stands almost in the middle of a wall with a door, facing a window on the opposite side of the room. This window faces almost south, so when he woke up, he could look from his bed at the morning light already sliding across the table top, as the side of the table is almost directly opposite the window. When he worked at it, he had a closet of clothes behind him, and in front of him two easels and three more cabinets: among them two display cases with work-related things. The third is closed with a mirror. On the shelf of perhaps the middle closet stood boxes neatly wrapped in black cardboard. - Take note of the medicines. He wrapped them himself. That's how he was," the Cricoteka lady said earlier.
A room-workroom, set up in a thoughtful, functional way - so as to be able to work and rest in concentration, without being distracted by unnecessary information (drugs!). But this modern (because functionally) organized room was set up with pre-modern furniture. An old bed and an old table, chairs, a stool, a collection of different but always "pre-war" cabinets, an old chest of drawers. How is this possible? One of the leaders of modern art of the 20th century in his home, in his space, does not surround himself with modern architecture?, modern design?
I was reminded of a conversation between architects I heard about in Mexico. To avoid digressions, however, I will recount a possible Cantor version of it:
- Why doesn't Cantor do everything modern?
- And what do you mean by "modern"?
- Well, you know, according to our times....
- Ah, Kantor had his own time here in Krakow.
Pay attention to the Polish language: our times. Not our time, but our times - and therefore our different times.
In the Imagination Room on Sienna Street, it's worth asking what was this individual and Krakow time of Tadeusz Kantor, that he brought his art to the heights of global recognition and appreciation? How did he do it, that he won in the constant international competition for the formula of contemporary art? Here at Sienna I feel that Kantor's power was a thinking derived from the courage to sink into locality. It seems that he needed the furniture and the view of old Krakow in his Room of the Imagination to claim a presence in the collection of our modern times.
Another strategy, almost unknown to art, appears in architecture and its competitions: it's good practice, the belief in repeating proven solutions invented contemporaneously by anyone and anywhere in the world. Or perhaps how much in the competitions of global good practice, and how many bold attempts derived from locality, is a measure of whether and how much architecture still remains art?
- Keep coming back here," I heard on the stairs.
- Yes, yes. I have a lot to think about here. Thank you!
***
