Single-minute communities: assembling collective agency with Paweł Kwiek

Abstract

This article analyses three multi-author films by Polish artist Paweł Kwiek. To make these films, Kwiek applied the same collaborative formula in different social contexts, producing three sets of ‘1-minute films.’ The first film, Niechcice (1973), consists of sketches co-produced with rural youth. The later films were made at art festivals in 1973–4. This article treats these projects as a triptych: three parts of one whole. Taken together, they move from an experiment in cross-class collaboration to an intimate game among friends. Drawing from the language of Kwiek’s peer Anastazy Wiśniewski, the article parses Kwiek’s critical idiom as an instance of ‘positive negation’ that both affirmed and contested aspects of socialist reality. Kwiek’s procedures for making participatory art anticipated theories of social cooperation soon to be articulated by opposition thinker Jacek Kuroń. In this light, Kwiek’s ‘1-minute films’ are exercises in self-organisation that achieved, if only one minute at a time, the democratisation of social life envisioned by the opposition in this decade.