Lecture: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

A presentation of the book of Krzysztof Jurecki. It contains twenty conversations about photography, performance, video and painting, carried with both renowned as well as less known artists of considerable artistic potential. The interviews are categorised into groups. The first one are conversations with the artists of the neo-avant-garde and Kultura Zrzuty (Andrzej Różycki, Andrzej Kwietniewski of Łódź Kaliska art group, Zbigniew Libera and Grzegorz Zygier), who sometimes distance themselves from the mainstream (Różycki). The next group are women artists with feminist viewpoint: Ewa Świdzińska and Magdalena Samborska. Joanna Zastróżna, Magda Hueckel and Sylwia Kowalczyk represent ideologies of different kind, even if being close to feminism. The dominant of the book is located in the third cluster of interviews, devoted to the topic of the sacred, the religiousness or the lack of it, search for spirituality in the Christian aspect (Zbigniew Treppa, Jan G. Issaieff, Basia Sokołowska), in the aspect of the Far East (Andrzej Dudek-Dürer, Katarzyna Majak), in the aspect of shamanism (Marek Rogulski) or video technology (Michał Brzeziński). The last group is represented by the artists true to photography, though of differing origin, like: photography teacher Waldemar Jama, pictorialist and portraitist Marek Gardulski, Wojciech Zawadzki - one of the founder of the programme of "elementary photography" and Jelenia Góra school of photography and Ireneusz Zjeżdżałka - representative of the "new documentary".