The Brooklyn Rail

Katarzyna Kozyra: What was your perception of art at the beginning of the 1990s, when you first started as an art critic, and what is your perception of art now? How would you define your aesthetic criteria then versus now?

Dorota jarecka: To put it briefly, I wouldn’t have even begun to involve myself in art criticism had I not met you and the other artists of my generation. I just realized that now, when you asked me this question. We met more than 20 years ago at the student’s workshop of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. I remember that your idea was to momentarily cover part of a landscape with a large piece of cloth. I understood it as a provocation. You wanted to cover and to disclose at the same time. There was a hole in the cloth, and you made us look at the sky through it. And I remember you advocating a realism of sorts and a closer connection between art and society. I fully agreed with this attitude then, and I still agree with it today. Maybe that’s why I was so critical of Polish art in the 1990s.

Kozyra: Have you ever needed anyone as a guru or an authority, and if so, why?

Jarecka: I have never sought a guru or a master, but I admired the older generation of Polish art critics; people such as Janusz Bogucki, Mieczysław Porębski, Barbara Majewska, Aleksander Wojciechowski, and Stefan Morawski. They were like Clement Greenberg was for the New York art scene; involved in politics, but also convinced about the autonomy of art, however outdated this conflict may seem.

Kozyra: Recently you started working as a curator. How do you reconcile the roles of an art critic and a curator? In your opinion, does it happen that critics and curators abuse their positions?

Jarecka: To be an art critic is to assume an authoritarian position. The whole idea of making judgments is based on power, which is typical for modernity. And I think that the role of an art critic is dying down simply because modernity is dying down. Can a critic’s use of power verge on abuse? Yes, when the media is oppressed by governments, political parties, or other factions. I don’t think that curators abuse their power that often, since the responsibilities are divided. Massimiliano Gioni, staging the exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace at the recent Venice Biennial, simply used his power. It is a clear message. But the recreation of the show When Attitudes Become Form at Fondazione Prada in Venice, that was a kind of an abuse, since it positioned itself as pure reconstruction, which it wasn’t. So how about a new slogan: “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art Exhibitions?”