Dada Politics

“Has the cancer of rationalism eaten up your brain? There is an opportunity for the lost”!1

Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed that we should find the golden means between the indifference of the original human state and the undefeated activity of our self-love. There was nothing about the simple state of utopia of nature, and what was significant was rather the active role in working out a model of society that would let us reform our customs and re-educate our senses. Nevertheless, history only gives a testimony that whenever something as technical as model is to be applied, its executors seem to be forgetting that it used to be only model, and this frequently opens up the road to abuse, inflation of power, and eventually to regime.

Then, as if simultaneously, in line with the principle of mutuality and complementarity of nature, somewhere on the periphery the germ of another force is budding: alternative and dynamic, frivolous and untamed, chaotic and incorrect. A force that exceeds the limitations of models or commands, as it precedes and transgresses them. Gushing here is the spring of rebellion, a pre-expressive element that will oppose the set structure of power. This rebellion, resistance, and passion of freedom is the active DADA energy. This is the heart of counterculture and the life inspiring breath of the great Goddess Eris.

The Orange Alternative points openly to its inspiration in Dadaism and surrealism. With its anti-structural and anti-rational (or surrational in the case of Marcel Duchamp) energy of the element, DADA has frequently provided the source of the contemporary political happening. From the pre-war avant-garde it took over the poetic of laughter, unlimited freedom in expression of thoughts, scathing wit, merciless irony, and – obviously – provocation. All these to attack in any manner possible – through the absurd, pastiche, grotesque, paradox – the dangerously alienating power: of the reason, of the social structure, or the order of norms set in stone. This precious energy of resistance that the Orange Alternative took over from the Dadaists may not be lacking, and if it ever happened so, people would turn into robots programmed to somebody else’s will, into externally controlled machines, devoid of will and devoid of thinking. Therefore, if anyone feels that something is going the wrong way, he can always reach for DADA.

Furnished with the pocket cosmodrome that we always have within our skulls, we have examined a handful of facts from the border of history of ideas and history of art to recognise the archaeology of the particular phenomenon that has gained both fame and recognition under the name of the Orange Alternative. The colour with the RGB 255-165-0 carries an activation potential, and laughter can trigger a revolution.

Counterculture in Action

The leading principle of action art is the movement of thinking that opposes the structure. This brings it close to the spirit of counterculture, present – without respect to time and place – whether this is the 1967 Summer of Love in California, or May 1968 in Paris, or Wrocław 1988. And (even though it is worthwhile) one does not need to know Richard Schechner to know that “the street is the stage”, nor Sir Ralf Dahrendorf or Erving Goffman to have the feeling that the main principle of explaining social facts today is their theatrical quality and value of participation in a social Spectacle. Spectacle here is a metaphor of existence, much like Game or Dream. What is the truth and what an appearance, what is reality and what is dream? Following the surreal fusion of dream and wakefulness into a single surreality, one does not need to answer this dualistic question any more. If we only learn to dream consciously.

We participate in this Spectacle, whatever its valuation, and we can participate in its creation, creating new situations, otherwise it is the Spectacle that will “do” us. The popular slogan “the street belongs to us” assumed a more tangible form in the discourse of British activists: “What the Parliament did, the Street can undo”.

The “lesson” of DADA taught through the mediation of the Orange Alternative teaches that action may be art, in which case it acquires higher efficiency, independent from the place where the action takes place – whether in Świdnicka Street or in front of the White House, the Embassy of Belarus, and in Tiananmen Square; during the Pride Parade, and at the “Fascism shall not pass” rally, during the operation Follow the White Rabbit in Katowice and at Halloween in New York. Whatever the scale of the operation and its precise course, what is of key importance is the very manifestation of the transgressive energy of life, the joyful creative element that does not tolerate limitations. The art of action, the unmediated and direct artistic operation is the expression of this very element.

Strangely enough, civic movements and artistic movements cannot often be separated in a simple way. As Johan Huizinga, a classic scholar in the field of anthropology argues, play is the source of culture. It was so that something extraordinary began from having fun together in a café, from an independent newsletter, and from happenings of the Movement of the New Culture.2 The Orange Alternative is therefore to be analysed not as an art or creative activity, nor as a political or civic movement, but rather in the context of art, and in the context of politics. To quote the thinker and performer Jan Świdziński, author of the theory of contextualism, in a film devoted to action art: “In certain context, every type of action is a political.”3

The Art of Direct Actions

Action art is not an invention of the avant-garde, and may be derived from the actions of Diogenes from the barrel, Chinese Taoist calligraphers, and the shaman practices originating in traditional cultures from all over the globe. It is the source performance of life acted to the glory of the fullness of being. This creative act, conceived as an event, is something at the same time very easy and very difficult. Much like performance, action art is “an opening of art to the everyday life” (Dziamski), art-life (Goldberg), and “fulfilled action” (Grotowski).4

To examine the happenings of the Orange Alternative in the context of art, it is necessary to define the semantic field. Usually, certain simplifications are made – concessions mostly to art history as a science – which define the actions performed in the context of art into types and subtypes, due to their form and nature. This allows us to talk about happening, anti-happening, performance, body-art, demonstration, and very many others, remembering that the so-called borders between the arts (perceived usually as formal categories of the media of communication) are fluid and defined primarily by the context. It is the context that allows identification of the various forms of human activity, and specifically to differentiate between arts of corresponding formal character (why not performance, monodrama, and dance). Each of the notions has its own history and a variety of semantic entanglements. Nevertheless, action art, which I define as “the art of direct action” allows attention focus on uniqueness of every human action: its dynamic character, both internally and in its deep philosophical assumptions. This approach is performative, spectacular, and theatrical, in the same sense in which theatron originates from the action of seeing.5 It is also the sensitivity to the praxis, to the real multilevel effect, as if it would be followed by certain dissatisfaction with the verbal or declarative level, or with the idea carried above life lacking of the quality that is provided by embodiment.

It also used to be assumed that, as a life-art, performance has its modern 20th-century roots in the Petersburg constructivist Stray Dog Café, in the futuristic Synthesis Theatre, and in the DADA actions in Zürich, Berlin, Paris, and New York. To understand the deep grounds of the connections between Dadaism and the socially involved alternative artistic movements, one needs to take into account the conclusions on the subject that have been worked out by the anthropology of art, and perceive the broad consequences of today’s dadaist activity as an influential pre-counterculture, anti-war movement and as involved in far-going intellectual transformations.6 And because DADA – perceived somewhat more broadly than just a phenomenon in the history of art – is something extremely significant for the subject of Orange Alternative that we are tackling, let us follow the principle ab Iove principium and move to DADA immediately to recall its origins.

History

“All artistic revolutions begin in cafés,” Tadeusz Kantor used to say. It was also in this way that – in well known circumstances – the DADA movement originated in Zürich in 1916. The multinational group of artists, predominantly poets and painters, inaugurated the activity of a fellowship of such profound significance for the development of culture of 20th century (and possibly also for 21st century) that this city of banks, watches, and Lenin may today boast the history of a small yet influential café known as Cabaret Voltaire. We can only speculate whether it was the name of the place that was to be considered critical towards the rationalism presented by the author of L’Ingénu, or was it to make references to the pitiless and mocking method of animating the intellect and spirit that this dramatist worked out and applied to expose the hypocritical “normality”.

Nonetheless, the Dadaist launched by Tristan Tzara wanted from its beginning to be abnormal and anti-rationalist, and to provoke actively and directly. The definition of art that the dominant milieu of pretentious aesthetes used was considered absurd and idiotic in the group gathered at the Cabaret Voltaire, and all the theories of art and attempts at explaining artistic action were considered uninteresting and antiquated. Nothing was left. Times of anti-art were proclaimed, as well as attitude of opposing all generally accepted opinions, equally expert superstitions and popular superstitions. The function that art used to play earlier was entirely lost.7 Such circumstances and this conviction needed confrontation. The Dadaist happeners believed that art has become solely an aesthetic pleasure based on arbitrary and unjust judgement of taste, which led to a situation in which significant for the reception of art was only admiration, and thinking was no longer necessary at all.

For the Dadaists, the only answer to this callousness of the alleged “sensitive” hard-headed people was the scandal. The method for achieving it was transgression of customary norms, canons in artistic – in painting and sculpture, and non-artistic – in life; through spontaneous direct action, a new and specifically Dadaist form of art. The intolerable young provocateurs – activists and artists altogether – were dangerous for every pre-established public order. And if that order proved to be based on hypocrisy and duplicity, the fears of its guardians were most justified. The group formed under the DADA banner craved for enlivening of the spirit and the intellect. Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Jean Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Richter, were later joined by others, including Max Ernst, Man Ray, the later “pope of surrealism” André Breton, and possibly the most radical of them – Marcel Duchamp. They gatecrashed events and pulled the legs of respectable professors, aged ladies, and perfectly groomed youngsters. They provoked intellectually with their eccentric behaviour, not with aggression. When they organised an exhibition, you would enter it through the toilets, to prevent all possibilities of the “temple of art” attitude, in its institutional form. Before they were considered entartete Kunst (a degraded art) in the Third Reich, Dadaists exhibited pigs in Nazi uniforms in Munich, to comment upon the political situation and provide the audience with a pretext to a serious and immediate consideration who really are the politicians governing them. At the same time they painted moustaches on inviolable monuments of culture.

This avant-garde approach of affecting the spectator with the form as well as with the content of the message, with intellectual and sensual guerrilla, was the inseparable companion of the DADA movement and later of surrealists, but its origin were in DADA. At numerous exhibitions and meetings, in which the space of the gallery was to be transformed into different world, the openings were always happenings avant la lettre. People dressed as fantastic creatures were walking the halls, naked women covered with seafood lolled on the tables, and the musical landscape was constructed of pre-noise music of unidentified metallic beats. The modernist desire for a future change, which an artistic action may bring about, was broken with another – performative and synchronous effect. The experience itself was becoming significant, and so was the event, and its transitory aspect, which Breton later named acte gratuit – a unbiased act, generated from the inside. Externally, it triggered the desire for cognition, encouraged expectation of what the organisers were going to do this time.

In one of these exhibitions, the surrealist painter Max Ernst added an axe to his sculpture, believing that if his art somehow hit the spectator, the spectator should also be able to hit it, so as to become united with the sculpture into a single work in the wonderful act of creative destruction.8

Gesture

As it proved later, of key importance for the transformations of Dadaism and its further development was the person of Marcel Duchamp. Following the great succès de scandale in France with the painting Nude Descending a Staircase, considered a mockery of Cubism, the artist made the famous “Duchamp’s gesture” in 1915. To knock the spectators out from the thoughtless and conservative intellectual fixation and to show the limitations of the recipients, Duchamp proposed to the New York exhibition Armory Show a porcelain urinal, which he entitled Fountain.

Much like the earlier Nude, this work by Duchamp was also rejected, yet an intriguing discussion broke out around it, which was much more interesting than the artefact itself. It was not so much the publicity of the scandal (although we do not neglect it),9 but rather the agitation that produced the rhizomatic effect. Duchamp’s gesture could have been polysemantic, depending on the recipients. It could turn the attention to the social role of the person traditionally defined as the artist, to its semidivine power, but also to everything else that was beyond the artist and what manifested in the mind of the spectator. It was a surreal effect, active at the level of imagination. Through provocation, it could disclose the superstitions of the recipient himself, his opinions about the status of a work of art, artist and finally with all what was connected to the dominant dualism of high and low culture. He could draw attention to the institution of the gallery, to the curators, and the criteria for the selection of works for exhibitions, and to their hidden assumptions and limitations. It was a change of focus – from what is aesthetic and retinal, to what is intellectual and spiritual. In this case – inversely proportional to the ordinary character of the object itself.

The Fountain was also the first ready-made in history, an object of everyday life, which in certain circumstances becomes a work of art by the force of a gesture (today this gesture can be construed as a contextual shift, thanks to the writings of Świdziński). Or, possibly, one should say: it had been a work of art even earlier, even though nobody noticed. The slogan of the Orange Alternative “Even a single policeman in the Street is a work of art” makes a significant contribution to Duchamp’s gesture.

After Duchamp’s arrival in the USA, his art found fertile ground. Some were still only shocked, but others began to take a closer look, and interpret what it was actually all about. The New York DADA began to develop, and so did its influence on art in the United States. And again, it became clear what a culture-forming role can be played by these insubordinate European artists. Even though externally, Duchamp himself dressed like a proper European gentleman, he was nevertheless one of the most radical intellectual revolutionaries. He did not sport green hair as Baudelaire did, nor walked an anteater on a leash like Dalí. But the answer to his presence in the United States came from the American “angry young men”, unsatisfied with the state of the art and world, who did not hesitate to reach for new, risky experiments in the search for the way out from the impasse. They were Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage.

The activity of Cage (born in 1912) was of key importance for the establishing of happening as an artform. First, in 1948, together with Merce Cunningham and Willem de Kooning, he worked on a pre-happening production of The Raft of the Medusa to the music of Erik Satie. Later, in 1952 he performed the action Theater Piece No. 1, which with time was considered the world’s first happening. Towards the end of the 1950s, in classes in “experimental composition”, Cage together with his students from the New School examined action art as a form of art that not only combined other media, but was also integrated with life and with the process that a person operating in a given situation as an artist experiences himself.

Happening

In 1957, at a spring picnic at his friend’s, Allan Kaprow (born in 1927), a student of Cage’s from Black Mountain College, coined a term “happening”, and two years later, i.e. in 1959, he performed the first operation using that notion in New York. It was remembered as 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, while Kaprow’s book Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, published by Abrams in 1966, described his invention and introduced other new forms in art, besides the happening, that have survived to this day.10

Following this and other experiments of Cage and Kaprow, and a group of artists close to them, the neo-Dadaist movement known as Fluxus was born. Officially, the first concert of Fluxus was organised in Wiesbaden in 1962, with the participation of, among others, John Cage, George Brecht, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostel, and many other intermedia artists (term coined by Higgins) combining experimental music and concrete poetry with happening and action. George Maciunas created the name Fluxus to define movement, flow, and life in opposition to stagnation, fossilisation, and deadness of mental structures.

One cannot ignore the fact that at the same time when Kaprow “invented” the happening, that is in 1957, the Situationist International was established in France; its initiators, Guy Debord (born in 1931) and Ivan Chtcheglov (born in 1933), began to apply art as a political tool and embraced the neo-Dadaist tactic of shock and cultural sabotage. It was a different form of social activism, referring to the modern anarchism and moving freely in the area of the art of life.

Another 20th-century source of action art is the gesture in action painting of Jackson Pollock (born in 1912) and his abstractionist expressionism. Even in the early 1940s, Pollock covered the canvas by pouring or dripping paint on it in a one-man dance with the painting matter. He became acquainted with surrealism and its ideas by the gallery that exhibited his works, and by his wife, the influential artist Lee Krasner. On the continent, gesture painting was termed informel, a name coined by Georges Mathieu in 1945. Another name of this type of painting, originating from the French word for a stain, is tachisme.

In Poland, tachisme was practised by Tadeusz Kantor (born in 1915), who “went to the hells of his unconscious”11 through informel painting, treated more as a form of self-cognition than an expression of the person of the artist. Later, Kantor began to bring informel into the theatre, using this way to paint costumes and building a philosophy of new art. “Art annexes life”, he would say. In fact it was an opening to the factor of chance, disclosing secret senses and the unordered, dark side of reality, in which structures are crystallised from chaos, and later become again dissolved into chaos.

1965 was the year of Cricotage, the first happening in Poland that ended in a scandal and dismissal of the gallery’s director. Even though the intentions of the artists were not political, the Communist authorities probably had to understand Cricotage as aiming against the public order, incomprehensible for interpretation, and moving, ergo dangerous to the stability of the system. The actions that the happening was composed of (cutting hair, shaving, eating pasta, etc.) were everyday activities transferred into the scene of artists café, taken out from their natural context and cast into the context of art, where they acquired new, accidental, and unexpected meanings.

Kantor’s happenings, besides the “happening theatre” that he ran at the time, reinforced this medium in Poland. The photographs taken by Eustachy Kossakowski at the Panoramic Sea Happening in Osieki in August 1967 became an icon of these actions. The photograph shows a figure dressed as an orchestra conductor standing on a rostrum going into the sea, with spectators behind him, waves of the element in front of him, and baton in hand. The constituent events of the Panoramic happening was The Raft of the Medusa based on Théodore Géricault, which – much like Cage and Satie’s spectacle – made reference to the famous romantic painting. This “first ever large-scale attempt by any painter to document a contemporary political scandal”12 was reconstructed on the Baltic beach and played out by a group of happeners in the presence of around 1000 spectators. The very scene presented in the painting by Géricault that provided the grounds for the action was connected to tragic events from 1816, when during the sea disaster of the Medusa, the officers (i.e. authorities) escaped in lifeboats, leaving the passengers in the grips of death. They nevertheless built a raft of their own accord, but out of the one hundred and fifty passengers, only fifteen remained alive to testify to the truth. While painting, Géricault invited his friends, including Eugène Delacroix, to be his models.

Kantor followed a similar path. In this way, which we find of double significance, the Raft of the Medusa happening initiated the performance activity of one of the most eminent representatives of action art in Poland – Jerzy Bereś (born in 1930), a Krakow sculptor and hippie. In the context of actions which we are discussing, Bereś’s manifestations are rather to be associated with the non-ironic approach, with their character being usually full of solemnity, as is emphasised in the titles including The Mass, The Oracle, The Prophecy, reminding of priestly, shamanistic, and magic actions. The artist usually performs them naked, emphasising in this way his sincerity, weaponlessness, and openness of intention. Bereś’s nakedness is connected to the nakedness of the hippies, yet there is a difference of effect. Similarly different is the nakedness of Ewa Partum from the famous photograph, in which she is standing in front of a uniformed policewoman “armed” in clothes. And even though parallels are tempting, they need not be twisted – action art is ruled by the logic of difference as well as by the logic of similarity. Nakedness may be a means of revealing the fact that it is “the emperor who is naked”. Much like the dwarf’s cap may show that the power held by force is in fact devoid of reality.

Evolutions of the Happening

The dwarf that migrated from Paracelsus’s magic to the realm of collective imagination was capable of leaping from the world of fairytales into the area of political arts. The genealogy of the Dutch Provos movement and the Dwarven Party suggests that the beginning occurred when the Dada-inspired Dutch countercultural artist Robert Jasper Grootveld organised street happenings against smoking tobacco in June 1964. His anti-smoking protests must have been so powerful and formally attractive that two hippie groups, also enthusiastic about street demonstrations and inspired by what Grootveld was doing, began to collaborate with each other. These were groups of pacifists and anarchists gathered together by Roel van Duijn, who joined their forces to protest jointly against war, especially nuclear. The movement based its philosophy on Dadaist kernel and its ideas on pacifism and anarchism; in questions of customs it referred to Marquis de Sade as a crucial thinker for the social theory of non-repressive culture formulated at the time by Herbert Marcuse. The term “Provo”, from which the name of the movement originated, was coined by Wouter Buikhuisen, who used it in his doctoral dissertation in 1965, where the term “Provos” defined the “young troublemakers”. In 1967, “performing a self-provocation”, Provo disbanded, and – to continue the actions of the unconventional activists – Roel van Duijn started another formation – the Dwarven Party. This, as we know, directly inspired the Orange Alternative. It also gave the Alternative its formal grounds: the orange colour, the pointed dwarven cap, and the happening.

As has already been said, happening is one of the forms of art of direct actions, which usually involve the presence of the performer with his corporality being felt by the spectators and co-participants. Possibly, it is the question of presence that is one of the reasons for the great efficiency of the actions of the Orange Alternative, its popularity and influence on actual political change in Poland.13 With my own person, I “stand up” to manifest something, with my very existence in a given place and time I speak out, I “stand up for” something or against something. This is an effect that is primarily performative. For the real presence to be possible – to quote Bereś the artist of manifestations – it is necessary to get to know the existing reality, preceding the act of carrying out the given performance, and the creation of an internal “report from that reality”.14 In the case of the Alternative, sometimes it was just the participation in the happening that created a possibility of making such a report from reality by its participants, co-participants, and the audience. As an action in the context of art, the happening was beyond the limits of interpretations controlled by the communist system, and therefore developed a distance necessary for free interpretation. Street actions involving large groups of people in one joyful event gave the co-participants an opportunity to feel that reality and to break the fear of repression.

Sometimes the border of power and authority was defined directly by the end of the police baton and the range of the police water cannon. Yet the very experience of joint participation in – as the Orange called it – Karnawał RIO-Botniczy was to reinforce the need for freedom and independence. What comes to mind is the question asked by Mirosław Pęczak, who must have been the first to show the Orange Alternative in the anthropological context: “Can a revolt be a celebration?”15

Following the history of the happening, which in the first period of its existence was primarily focused on the cognition and secondly on the effect, the Orange happening provided an opportunity to see how far one could go with the communist authorities, and at the same time to what degree the minds of the passers-by – fellow citizens in the shared police state – were captive or free. From the beginning of the happening, the need to experience the reality, the need to examine the border between fiction and reality was linked with the sense of a crisis of this reality.16 Frequently, the happening first served to detect the crisis and then to overcome it.

The happenings performed in the 1980s by Major and friends differ from the actions of other purely artistic groups (as the Academy of Movement) and from the operations undertaken by individual artists using an event or performance for expression and communication. To perceive how the context of the history of Polish and global action art can expand our understanding of it, one needs to plunge into the fascinating tale of discoveries made by independent artists, their adventures, struggles and choices. And first of all, to understand the logic that gave birth to both Dadaism, situationists, Kabouters (dwarves), the Movement for New Culture, and the Gallery of Manic Actions of the Orange Alternative from Łódź.

Logic

The word DADA that the artists of the Cabaret Voltaire chose for the definition of the movement means “yes, yes” in Russian, while in Romanian it is “no, no”. The logic of the happening projects of the Alternative seems to be simple, yet it similarly remains a paradox. It is the logic of a proof that is not straightforward, and is also known as an apagogic or Socratic proof. It is at times referred to as reductio ad absurdum: bringing down to opposition.

The logic that corresponds with this is manifested in the context of the double performance of Elżbieta Cieślar and Emil Cieślar (born 1934 and 1931 respectively) entitled Dobrze/Stańczyk and produced in 1977. The project made reference to the contrast between the interior and exterior, and alluded to the historical painting by Jan Matejko presenting the sad Stańczyk – Stanisław Gąska, the jester of three Polish kings, who was the informal commentator on their actions. After a finished performance, sad Stańczyk is sitting in an armchair and pondering. Emil Cieślar, dressed as Stańczyk, standing on a ladder with a cartoon speech bubble saying “Dobrze” (“it’s OK”), commented with his performance both on the political and artistic situation, showing the difference between meaning and sense in art under the rule of censorship. It also marks the tension between the double game and the deep game of life. The Cieślars frequently operated on the border of politics of artistic experience, aesthetics, politics, and the bond between ideology and art, creating, for example, a project of an alternative Polish pavilion at the Venice Biennial, where they presented Polish independent art along with the civic proposals of the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR). Remaining in this climate, but also making references to Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Abbie Hoffman, Guy Debord, was a number of later works of the Cieślars, which were presented at their retrospective exhibition at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Warsaw, entitled Anarchia. Repassage. The Cieślars’ “attempt to exist without the state” remains a significant idea to this day, as it was based on the “desire to create situations favouring intensive coexistence of individuals”.17

A Different Subversion

The Orange happeners, much like situationists, Provos and other Dadaists after Dadaism before them, based their operations on the powerful logic of reductio ad absurdum. Besides other creative poetics and logics, it is a distinct and sophisticated surrealist technique (sometimes purely subversive, and at times absolutely non-confrontational), recalling a double (and sometimes triple) game. It is a technique which combines involvement and distance, heat and cold, in a very subtle formal combination. Usually behind it stands a very complex creative drama, because even though it seems that such subversive forms are frequently used today, I wouldn’t like to reduce them to pure irony only. In somewhat more refined form, it is successfully used by a number of artists, mostly performers, among whom worth mentioning are Cezary Bodzianowski and Oskar Dawicki, but one could also speak of it in reference to the theatre of Piotr Bikont, and the painting of Andrzej Urbanowicz from the series Letters to Eris.

A similar poetics, making reference to countercultural ways of dealing with censorship applied by the dominant current, can be perceived in the happening techniques of the Orange Alternative, in the texts of its flyers, manifestoes, and the scenarios for its operations. The generally known motif of the absurd that provides food for thought, a model of provocation in thoughts, acquires a more subtle extension in the form of a multi-level message. It is preceded by the phase of disorientation, of profound importance for the efficiency of the communication itself. Its essence is purposefully mistaking the tracks, being cast into the deep water of meanings, and triggering the message: “cope on your own, read the context”. In the happenings organised by the Orange, the purposeful change of the context and shift of senses may be significant: giving away scarce toilet paper, organisation of the Eve of the October Revolution, and announcing the slogan “Free Isaura”, after the authorities imprisoned another group of opposition activists in the wake of civic protests.18 Today, a significant part of the DIY culture, efficiently competing with the ideologies of mainstream and structures of the reality of semi-products, thoughtlessness and haste, is based on a similar communication technique.

In a situation of group’s non-violence principle and the obvious threat from the police, the happenings of the Orange Alternative must have been discussed and prepared in detail. Potential reactions of the authorities and the behaviour of the security services had to be analysed; the entire dynamic course of the event needed thinking through. Circumstances imposed necessity of finding other, artistic, imaginative and intellectual ways of opposing abuse, to find them in the spirit of developing alternative culture which resisted dominant model, through actions of performing arts. The major predecessors and inspirers operating on the border of neo-avant-garde theatre and anthropological studies were Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwik Flaszen with the idea of active culture.19 This idea and the activity of Grotowski were of profound resonance in the culture-forming milieu of Wrocław, known as the “theatrical capital of Poland”, where the founders of the Orange Alternative were studying.20 Grotowski’s work in the middle of the 1980s, co-creating the so-called Second Reform of the Theatre, and inspired by spiritual revolutionaries of the like of Stanislavsky and Artaud, was focused primarily on performance art, yet perceived differently than in visual arts. The paratheatrical actions of the Workcenter in Pontedera (focus on intense technical development work, involvement of the entire human being in practices and exercises integrating the person and regaining the body) attracted many and radiated not only to Wrocław and Poland but much further afield. The art of Grotowski, “experimenting” with the anthropological theatre in an area totally alternative to the mainstream, was initially formed as a theatre laboratory, and later it developed into a paratheatrical ritual workshop with performative actions.

Similarly Bereś, one of the most active Krakow hippies and an avowed pacifist, in his mystical manifestations explored the spiritual territories of development of the human being and potential of communication with others. Aldona Jawłowska, the author of the famous Drogi kontrkultury (The Roads of Counterculture), showed a number of parallel activities at the time of the most intensive operation of the Orange Alternative, listing in a single breath: Grotowski’s Laboratorium Theatre, Pracownia Olsztyńska, Action Group from Toruń and Bydgoszcz, the Gardzienice Theatre, and the Repassage Gallery; and describing them as: “more than theatre”.21

Yet events in the microscale could play a significant role in the transformation of consciousness. The Cieślars organised “ritual” tea parties that need to be treated from the perspective of time as independent works of art. The phrase of the Kwiek/Kulik duo associated with the Gallery, saying that “you are an artist of behaviour”, tells us much about how they ran the Repassage Gallery in 1970–1977 in the spirit of Oskar Hansen’s Open Form theory and new formula of direct presence in culture.22 Shifting the point of semantic gravity, the claim resulted in a fusion – to use a simplification – of the artistic approach to everyday life and the “life’s” approach to art, taking its root in the 1970s. In the following decade the approach showed itself through operations of the like of Cieślars’ Dobrze/Stańczyk, vested with new creative, anarchist energy, originating from the Erisian “spirit of objection”, which is usually manifested in the form of a trickster or jester. The dwarf of the Orange Alternative is obviously a political trickster, but all art associated with the intention of social effect seems to have trickster’s qualities.

Efficient Involved Action

The subject of “art and activism” is too broad and entangled, yet if we have mentioned the “effect of the Orange Alternative” and the efficiency of these forms of happening, as well as their translation into reality, it will be necessary to examine the details of the efficiency of performance itself, to avoid misunderstandings. The history of the happening gives evidence that a real action should not be considered more valuable (i.e. more efficient) than an imagined event that has not been externally executed. This may be easily understood if one examines the evolution of the artistic activity of the author of the notion of “happening”, Kaprow, who, at a certain point in time, practically ceased any external actions in favour of conducting internal ones. The criterion for judgement may be the action’s level of intensity in experiencing causation and its – as we would say today – rhizomatic quality. Personally I confirm Kaprow’s opinion saying that performance which is not executed but experienced internally can have a powerful real effect.23

Therefore, happenings of the Orange Alternative performed only conceptually or verbally may also become interesting.24 Performance, as mentioned, usually roots in presence, albeit it is not a necessary condition of it. The conceived and the embodied are dimensions of one single reality. Following the psychoanalyst approach of Julia Kristeva: a metaphor becomes a metamorphosis through the growth of intensity and condensation of meanings. Categories become blurred. Yet the experience remains. The virtual and the real are no longer a pair of oppositions. In this case, the question arises how to evaluate the efficiency of social actors. Which one would be more influential: the one, whose direct action has a visible external effect, or the one whose non-action but powerful internal transformation results in a movement effecting the entire network of senses (as in the butterfly effect). Sometimes one simply needs to move and to do something with his presence; personally and performatively. This may be worth remembering, especially today, when so much can be done with a single movement of a finger on the mouse. The source of movement, therefore, lays elsewhere.

Possibly some of the actions of Orange Alternative, too risky or too drastic in confrontation with the police, considered potentially inefficient and for that reason abandoned, should be included in a full curriculum of the group’s art. Performative approach enables this kind of treatment. Evidence proves that the effect of the actions of the Orange Alternative was frequently laying in a very significant transformation of feelings, a transformation of anger and fear of the Communist system into a joyful protest activating laughter. “Major Fydrych and his legions of dwarves convinced them that the situation was bad but not serious. Just two years later, communism collapsed entirely. The world was shocked with the pace of its fall.”25

The Method

There are questions that should not be avoided and must turn up in this text. What can the Orange Alternative signify to these historians, anthropologists and other researchers who know the subject only from its documentation, traces of actions, or from records provided by oral history? What might the Orange Alternative mean in the future, and what forms of operation that it worked out can remain something more than just precious record of the past? Is there “something more”? What do the signs suggest? Future inquiry is vital, contextual as well as specificating and positioning examination. The interpretation of the archaeology of the Orange Alternative and its relations to other artistic creations involves opening of the path to acknowledge significant differences, portraying the art of action in its more radical political forms that correspond to today’s potentials and circumstances, as well as to regard artists focused entirely on the politics of internal experience and its effectiveness.

The actions of the Orange Alternative may also provide the grounds for further interests in the context of actual discourse about grassroots movements and self-organisation. Employing performative experiences of counterculture enables to develop new forms of social interaction, based on the “desire to create situations that favour an intensive coexistence of individuals”. These forms designed in the post-productive communications society would probably have to be more subtle and more sophisticated than in times of communism or even in consumptionist phase of neoliberalism.26 Yet it may draw from the Orange Alternative’s approach, and from its means of participation and engagement.

The so-called workers of art and areas of their operation, including the social context of art, political art, aesthetic politics, and collectivism are inscribed in the formula of applied social arts in Poland, developed during the evolution of counterculture, and its development in the art of the 1970s. Primarily through the contextual art of Świdziński, to which – for unknown reasons – today’s artists unfortunately don’t refer too often.27 Because of that, the question of “what does art do?” receives a too narrow interpretation in the circumstances where its role as a means for transforming the internal experience is marginalised, and its function in the public dimension may often be limited to setting certain political and social questions defined by the system of cultural management and financing. This is the reason why I tried to emphasise the anthropological effect of the happenings harmonizing the social and the psychological aspect into a continuum of mutual interdependence.

At the performative level, when a big group of people goes out into the street, the situation of a spectacle – the S situation (S for spectaculum) – automatically develops. The participants know that they would be seen, and the gaze of the witnesses adds energy and charges their actions with meaning. The action of setting the main point of attention was the beginning of all happenings of the Orange Alternative. It was followed by the polarisation between the group of happeners and the group of spectators, which was later to be abandoned to involve activity of the co-participants to play the leading role in the event. This is a basic structure of involving the passer-by and a phenomenology of a majority of Alternative’s surreal-like happenings.

Initiated by a historian, the Orange Alternative can be considered a movement aware of the history of the avant-gardes with all their political and social entanglements: from the futurists’ support of fascism, anti-fascist activity of the Dadaists, communist engagement of the Surrealists, and anarchism of the situationists and the Provos. This awareness built a distance towards politics as such, and connected the Alternative to other movements referring sceptically to all the forms of power games. This is why the initiative of a group of friends from Wrocław purposefully based on ambiguity, not only due to censorship introducing the dissociating of meaning, and blurring. Its achievements such as tactical frivolity and its effect on the existential plane are hard to overemphasise. The appearance of dwarves in the street, their operation, and their disappearance, it was leaving the spectators with a strange feeling of nonsense. Moreover, they provoked a consideration of “what the cause of this feeling is: the breaking of the rules or the experiencing of the illusion of stability and stagnation”.28 This is the DADA effect: being kicked out of the groove, a provocation that makes use of surreal poetics.

The Mask of Surrealism

It is very important to remember that the notion of “surrealism”, used in the context of the Orange Alternative, was applied to express strangeness, unusual, unreal and fantastic character of an object, and this was the first and basic meaning of it. In this sense a term “surrealism” is used in common language. When writing his introduction to the Anthology of Surrealism, Adam Ważyk did not omit this point.

As mentioned before, the notion of surrealism was used by the happening artists in an unorthodox manner, and frequently had nothing to do with the philosophy of integrated reality postulated by André Breton, combining the dream and wakefulness into a single superreality. It was rather a mask used to remain spontaneous, and a way of undercover criticism. Still in 2004, Fydrych spoke about “expansion of surrealism”, when pointing on the advancing disorder in the field of politics and corruption. It hardly had anything to do with surrealism in the strict sense, but provided bases for associating it with the meaning that the colloquial language gave it. Calling something “absurd” served emphasising the resistance against the reality of the regime. It was alike with the expression of “the happening of everyday life in Poland”, which was linked to the happeners’ experiences from their activities in which a basic scheme of interactions with the police was established: the harsher the police reaction, the more ridicule its effects.

When saying that there are “better happenings in the parliament than the operations of the Orange Alternative”, Fydrych ironically pointed to the “spontaneous character” and the “improvisation” of what politicians do instead of working. The verbal puns, its transversal character (doubletalk), allowed sincerity and critical directness, which would otherwise have been repressed. The language is at the service of intention, and not the other way round, while some categories and words retain their flexibility and internal versatility which the artists frequently find highly suitable. This is also a reference to social stereotype of an artist as the other, a weirdo, a madman. Yet, there is a method in this madness.

Influence

Mohandas Gandhi, the most famous promoter of nonviolence, once said, “Be the change that you would like to see in the world”. In the process of crystallisation of the common dream about a world that we desire, it is predominantly the internal practice that seems to be significant; nevertheless, there are situations when one must suspend the non-action and perform an action efficiently and with joy.

When asked about counterculture in Poland, Krzysztof Lewandowski, a writer and owner of legendary publishing houses “Empty Cloud” and “Flying Kite”, said “the source of political happening lies in the ridiculous character of power. The more ridiculous it is, the more intensive the political happenings.” This is just the point.

The Orange Alternative are the yes-men of Solidarity, uncompromising provocateurs, intelligent enough to apply the method of non-violence and to achieve measurable effects.29 In this sense, they are “konkretny” people in the sense given to the term by Padraic Kenney, writing about the Carnival of Revolution in Eastern Europe.30 His book analyses the actions of involved alternative artistic movements in the entire region, groups that used laughter to defend freedom in Wrocław, Lviv, Leipzig, and Teplice. The author points out the exceptional social effectiveness and the political results of these actions achieved mostly by unconventional artistic forms, opening to social communication and direct manner. According to the American researcher, the happenings of the Orange Alternative and parallel groups had a significant influence on the process of historical change of the political systems. Carnival, which Kenney perceives according to Bakhtin’s theory, proves a strong influence of countercultural activities of the Orange Alternative, as well as activities of the Czechoslovak John Lennon Peace Club, and the Peace and Human Rights initiative in East Germany.

Today, these actions can be examined in the field of the anthropology of performance, and compared to the recent political happenings. The Orange Alternative is DADA, and as Tzara once wrote, “Dada is political.”

The Closing

Although DADA is habitually associated with the nonsense, it should be linked with the paradox instead. The power of familiarity is mistakenly trying to convince us that we live in a certain dualist system: nonsense – sense, from which there is no way out. In this juxtaposition, it is the nonsense that follows the sense, yet let us not be so scrupulous in repeating this doubtful hierarchy. For it seems that it is rather the sense that originates from nonsense, much like everything that is generated from chaos, and not the other way round. DADA sounds childish, because it has a quality of being primal, close to the beginnings. It draws its power from the frivolity pitted against the structure of mature shells and masks of personas.

“Sense” is connected with reason, understanding, logic and order. Alternatively, “the senses” are multiple. The artist introduces the new and uncommon, adds something to the resources of culture, transforms and enriches it, and therefore acts in accord with the principle of n–1+n (where n–1 stands for removal of the present order of ideas, +n is the enriching element).

A situation of multiplicity is developed, no longer dominated by a single sense, but the plurality of senses, the sensory and aesthetic fusion of signals. Nonsense serves a cause that makes sense, is present on the surface of the event, defines it formally, yet in the background of the action there is a political difference, and it is that difference which defines the context. The context may be a reference to the alternative, to what is different (to other texts). From that multiplicity on a higher level of complexity a quantum leap can be made into the new experience of sense. The sense crystallises for a moment, acquires a form and is dissolved again, into the joyful chaos of multiplicity, from which another structure will be formed and a new alternative will be born.