Main Space

Cameo (April 23 - June 6, 2010)

Artists: Tadeusz Kantor, Pawel Kwiek, Piotr Uklanski, Krzysztof Bednarski, Zbigniew Warpechowski, Jozef Robakowski, Jan Swidzinski, Zuzanna Janin, Akademia Ruchu, Wojciech Bruszewski, Waclaw i Leslaw Janiccy, Jaroslaw Flicinski, Edward Krasinski

Guest Curated by Lukasz Ronduda, curator of film/video art at the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw

Triple Candie is pleased to present an exhibition curated by Lukasz Ronduda. Realized without the permission of the artists and without their actual artwork, it consists of snippets from unrelated films in which Polish artists have had bit or walk-on parts over the past 50 years. Most took the parts early in their careers solely for mercenary puposes and never considered them to be their artistic work or that they would ever be presented in a fine art context. The thirty-minute film is presented on a single monitor.

The exhibition is alternately funny, smart, and poignant. Some of the acting parts required the actors to be animated and silly, resulting in an image of them that contrasts with their more serious artistic personas. Moreover, seeing the artists -- all of whom became central actors in the development of advanced forms of Polish art -- so marginalized within such a popular medium encourages one to see the exhibition as either a critical comment on the relative insignificance of much artistic practice within society as a whole, or the collusion between the artists and their big-box-office nemesis, whether or not that was the curator's intention. Finally, because the exhibition consists of no actual artwork and its meaning is derived largely through its thoughtful assemblage, the authorial spotlight is inevitably cast back upon the curator himself.

On the occasion of "Cameo"'s original presentation at the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw last summer, Ronduda wrote:

"In film terminology, a cameo appearance, or just a cameo, is a brief appearance by a known person in a work of the performing artists, such as a motion picture. This film brings together a dozen or so such appearances by outstanding Polish artists, chiefly from the avant-garde movement. Cameo shows well-known artists busy, as part of their eccentric performances, seducing the viewer with costume, dialogue, psychology, anecdote, or expressive acting, that is, all that they despised in the space of art. Cameo offers an at-once suggestive and perverse vision of a fulfillment of the avant-garde dream of ultimately doing away with art's autonomy. Similarly, for the curator/director, Cameo as an exhibition/film, is an attempt to redefine the modes of working with the artist/actor and their work. Cameo tries to criticize the roles we play in daily life, to blur the distinct lines of classification that define art and hinder its freedom."