Józef Robakowski

Józef Robakowski is a key figure in Eastern European video art and one of the originators of the Polish avant-garde. His work nowadays is placed among the classics of structural and analytic cinema and he can be numbered among the heirs to the avant-garde artists of the 20th century, such as Władysław Strzemiński, Katarzyna Kobro, and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) and is presently himself a point of departure for a new generation of young artists. In 1962, he created his first experimental film 6,000,000 by using found footage. His works of the 1960s and 1970s (such as the non-camera film Test II, 1971) discarded narrative and film’s representational function. Remarkable for Robakowski is his neo-avant-garde and neo-Dadaist approach; his works analyze the language of media and draw from the tradition of Constructivism, recording the absurd communist reality in the 1970s and 1980s Poland with a light touch and a sense of humor (From My Window, 1978-1999). At the same time, they are profoundly political (Brezhnev’s Funeral, 1982) and very private (The Touch of Józef, 1989; Of Fingers, 1982). Robakowski is co-founder of the Film Form Workshops (1970-1977), theorist, and academic lecturer at the Łódź Film School. Since the beginning, one of the most important strands in his work has been light. Among his most interesting pieces is Attention: Light! (2004, with Wiesław Michalak), was created according to Paul Sharits’ colors that flicker to the music of Frederic Chopin.

Submitted by Persons Projects