Foksal Gallery's Archive: Between Inventory and Place

This essay by Pawel Polit, published in Afterall Journal 21 in September 2009, examines the dialectical tension between Mariusz Tchorek's 'General Theory of Place' and Tadeusz Kantor's happening-based practice at Foksal Gallery in Warsaw. On 21 January 1967, Kantor orchestrated the 'Letter' happening, where a 2x14m letter was carried by eight postmen through Warsaw streets and then destroyed. This event challenged the gallery's initial model of exhibition-as-work, formulated by Tchorek, Wiesław Borowski, and Anka Ptaszkowska in 1966. The theory of place emphasized participation, unpredictability, and the viewer's engaged attitude, rejecting conventional exhibition formats. Kantor's ideas, influenced by his 1965 New York stay, promoted dematerialization and the 'object's vanishing.' The conflict evolved through the late 1960s, with Kantor's approach gaining ascendancy by the 1970s, leading the gallery toward an analytic model of Conceptualism. Key projects include the Panoramic Sea Happening (23 August 1967), where the Foksal archive was sunk into the sea, and Assemblage d'hiver (January–April 1969). The essay also discusses works by Henryk Stażewski, Zbigniew Gostomski, Edward Krasiński, Włodzimierz Borowski, and Grzegorz Kowalski, and the 1971 texts 'Documentation' and 'The Living Archives' by Borowski and Andrzej Turowski, which proposed a 'placeless' model of art.