Dobro, to je bila Kozyra..
A da vidimo sad i Liberu, tipa koji je izazvao zaista jako, jako burne rasprave u Poljskoj i cijelom svijetu radom koji cemo pokazati dolje...
Los Angeles Times
Monday, May 19, 1997
COLUMN ONE
An Artist's Volatile Toy Story A defiant Pole used Lego blocks to depict a Nazi death camp to show the gap between the ideal world marketed to children and reality. Works spark fight over free speech, Poland's sensitivity about its past.
By DEAN E. MURPHY, Times Staff Writer
COPENHAGEN--Polish artist Zbigniew Libera is passing up the opportunity of a lifetime for the sake of some Lego toys packed away in the storeroom of an art gallery here.
"I couldn't sleep the entire night after making up my mind," he said. "But I had to refuse. For me, the whole thing is very clear."
Libera was invited to participate in next month's Venice Biennale exposition in Italy, one of the world's premier arts events and a dream come true for any struggling artist. Countless collectors and about 2,500 journalists converged on the show in 1995.
But the invitation came with a Faustian hitch: The Legos must stay behind. Libera's newest, most contentious artwork depicts with childlike innocence the horrors of a concentration camp--all through the simple construction of plastic building blocks donated by the Denmark-based Lego Group, which was unaware of Libera's subject.
The curator of the Polish pavilion in Venice, sculptor Jan Stanislaw Wojciechowski, said the works are "explosive material" that treat too frivolously one of the darkest moments in European civilization. Ticking off his many objections, he said taking on the Holocaust with one of the world's most beloved playthings is out of line and perhaps even anti- Semitic.
"I was really afraid that a commotion surrounding this work would overshadow everything else in our exhibit," Wojciechowski said in his Warsaw office. "For Poles, it is a great symbol that the Germans placed concentration camps on our soil and, in this way, negatively marked Polish history. The concentration camp is also a great symbol for Jews around the world."
Libera, who spent a year in prison under communism for sketching unauthorized political cartoons, insists that the Lego creations are essential to his current collection. His recent artworks employ ordinary objects to mock mass culture's obsession with everything from large sex organs to trendy narcotic highs.
"This is censorship all over again," said the lanky, fair-haired artist. "I created this work to inspire discussion, not to suppress it."
Libera created his piece by assembling Lego blocks into replicas of death camp facilities, photographing them and then using the photos to adorn authentic-looking Lego cardboard packages, complete with the disassembled pieces, the company logo and multi-language safety warnings. The images include crematories, gallows and doctors administering electric shocks to prisoners. In one scene, random Lego limbs are piled outside an Auschwitz-style barracks. In another, skeleton figures--taken from the popular Lego pirate series--haul bodies to be incinerated.
The display is so unsettling in its playful simplicity that the Lego Group, which sponsors Libera, 38, backed by his newfound patrons at the fashionable Galleri Faurschou here in the Danish capital, has stood his ground. The Lego collection, he said, is neither anti- Semitic nor irreverent, but a provocation about child rearing, social norms and the cultural cacophony that the free market has brought to formerly Communist Eastern Europe.
"How long will it take our culture to create a child's desire for a concentration camp in miniature plastic form?" Poland-based art critic Nigel Warwick wrote in the magazine Flash Art after viewing the pieces. "Which cultural forces will erode the legitimacy and impact of such historical events on our contemporary mentality?"
Copyright Los Angeles Times
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