Andrzej Kwietniewski
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Andrzej Kwietniewski (born 1951 in Lodz) - polish artist, retired member of LODZ KALISKA group
When precisely half a century ago the London-based critic Lawrence Alloway came up with the notion of POP-ART, he did not apply it to the so-called "true art", but to ordinary citizens of Albion humanly desperate to get in touch with comprehensible culture, i.e. popular one in the narrow sense. Alloway's attitude to women remains somewhat of a mystery though. When two years later a true English artist, a certain Richard Hamilton, put up a collage Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, he quoted POP-ART forms and meanings in high art, which helped to raise the new trend to the very top of modern art tendencies. Hamilton's attitude towards the fairer sex seems seriously outdated though - just as everything made in Great Britain once upon a time. Even a rough analysis of that historical collage can lead to such a conclusion: the two ladies, providing cleaning and sexual services, are pushed to the margins; while the male - Hamilton himself equipped with a fashionable POP racket - poses in Reni Riefenstahl's style as a Discobolos of modern manhood right in the centre of the picture. A few years later, when a New Yorker called Andy Warhol promoted Campbell's soup in the non-art market by purely artistic means, he steered POP-ART from the ghetto of the avant-garde into the arms of a wide audience. His attitude to women was in fact non-existent, although both in advertising and in art such a denuded female non-existence is difficult to find.
Despite minor divergences of opinion, the three gentlemen shared one belief: be it POP or not, life goes on independently of art. In his definition of POP-ART Alloway juxtaposed common ideas of beauty ? with fine arts in the then meaning of the term. Hamilton, that remarkably sharp ironist, kept out of the world of advertising, emphasising his own being 'normal' and insisting that art as such should also keep out. Even that quintessential Bohemian and great apologist of modernity, Warhol, who founded his art on the image of America synonymous with advertising, maintained that the advertising can become art only occasionally, when a pop-artist decides to make it such.
When almost fifty years later the world underwent a dramatic (and unbelievable to pop-artists) change and Łódź Kaliska introduced - attention! - NEW-POP, the new world conquered by popular brands and products has just declared victory of sheer illusion in an explicit old POP-ART style. Or rather, in the NEW-POP style. For if we examine every variant of life from a philosophical, material or conceptual perspective, today's ghastly existence is indisputably the most brilliant hypocrisy and deceit that has ever existed. Rather than being just a new artistic trend securing Lodz Kaliska place in history, NEW-POP expresses an approach which does not have to be - and often is not - associated with art. It is the position in which a NEW-POP artist again becomes a creator and consumer of POP-ART, quite as the one described by Alloway. Utterly realistic, mimetic even, NEW-POP draws on reality, replicating life like a laser photocopier. It does not offer any strained comments or quotation marks, since life has become ambiguous to the extent that it got imperceptible in this respect. For this reason Lodz Kaliska's NEW-POP raises the most urgent and fundamental contemporary issues, asking - after Hamilton - "Just what is it that makes...?" The question has taken a new meaning, however, and the answer provided by Lodz Kaliska implies that the ideas for which art once 'fought' (more or less ironically) have become reality. Such incidents are known as deterministic variations.
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