Dispersion of a Work of Art – Adam Marczyński, Tadeusz Kantor, Karol Broniatowski

Abstract

The article is an analysis of selected works of art of Polish artists of the 1970s: compositions by Adam Marczyński from the Variable series (the second half of the 1960s and 1970s), the Multipart action by Tadeusz Kantor (1970) and figures by Karol Broniatowski (from the Threat and Big Man series, 1976-1977), in which the title dispersion is understood as a consequence of the disintegration of the prototype by initiating a further journey of its already emancipated components. The material turn perspective was also referred to in the analysis: Bruno Latour's non-anthropocentric Actor-Network Theory (ANT), according to which it can be assumed that a work of art and its creator constitute a certain social network within which all “actors” function on equal terms in the community of “humans and non-humans”, as well as the anthropological theory of art by Alfred Gell, who proposed replacing the study of the object of art as a carrier of symbolic meanings with the study of a work of art as an object in a network of relations, trying to answer questions about the motives and contexts of action of social “makers” (artists) and their production of “indexes” (works of art). In the study, the act of the initial ordering of the system in a work of art and its subsequent disintegration – dispersion – is assessed from the perspective of the concept of entropy, derived from the field of physics, which is a measure of the degree of disorder in a given system – and its opposite, negentropy