Tadeusz Kantor

‘The Work of Art and the Creative Process’ (Kantor’s notes on the artist and the theatre from the play Wielopole/Wielopole)

Tadeusz Kantor, “The act of writing a book, composing a symphony, or painting a picture is acknowledged to be a creative process, and thus a unique and privileged manifestation of the human spirit. For this reason, it may seem strange that the perception of this uncommon process occurs only after it has been extinguished. For what is actually consumed is merely its product, in the form of a book, the orchestral performance of a work, an exhibited picture. The actual creative process remains inaccessible to us. To state this at its most extreme, we may say that in the reception of the work of art there is a paradoxical cancelling out of the most inspired, the most spiritual, moment: of the whole mystery of creativity. Only the trace left by this process is fed to the consumer, he gnaws on its imprint like a dog chewing a bone, desperate to find in it some image of the Great Explosion. Quite fruitlessly.”

Kantor denied the popular label ‘process art’ – he made products, specific end results, but these acted as what he called, “a smokescreen of seriousness,” thrown up to catch the particles of creativity that emerge along the way (but are extinguished on completion). Illusionism in the theatre was, for Kantor, the buffer zone that separated the actor from the audience, the spectator from participator. The problem for Kantor however was that the possibility of participation, implied by bringing theatrical fiction closer to real life, was an impossibility. It was merely creating another deception, or a double-bluff, what he described as, “a born-again fundamentalism.”

Merging art and life, drawing the audience into the entirety of the creative process was more complex than removing the stage set from the theatre and placing it into the factory. This is the worst scenario; creating a greater fiction than the process is trying to negate. Kantor saw representation as a farce, it does not lend substance/conctretize the fictive character but the opposite; it reduplicates fiction. Instead it is better to use a site incongruent to the play’s substance. Kantor favoured places of limbo; the train station, the bombed out house, the post office. These places would resist a homogenous interpretation with the play itself and expose the contraction between fiction and reality. He also employed the use of the BIO-OBJECT; more than props or decor these became part of the actors themselves, actual materials, rooted in reality by their actuality, acting independently to the fictional plot, like the limbo sites.

Kantor’s methods are complex, pre-empting Happenings of the sixties his theatre is neither fiction nor reality. He created a space for art to exist in neither realm but each negating the other to expose the fictions within our own reality, and the reality within our fictional worlds.