Further On, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre (review)

The new collection of Tadeusz Kantor’s texts edited by Michal Kobialka with accompanying essays by the editor presents an invaluable commentary on Tadeusz Kantor’s performative, painterly, and written work and offers to American readers the second seminal installment of Kantor’s texts. The first was a volume, also edited by Kobialka, A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944–1990. One of the central conceptual themes organizing Further On, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre is the erosion of the concept of representation in the post–World War II period. By invoking Adorno, Artaud, and other leading theorists, Kobialka shows the impact of the devastating war memories on Kantor’s performance practice, paintings, and theoretical writing.

Kantor’s wartime performances of Balladyna by Juliusz Slowacki (1942) and The Return of Odysseus by Stanislaw Wyspianski (1944) stand out as the most pertinent and far-reaching examples of Kantor’s early work and thinking. They also introduced two main motifs of his art: the collapse of the narrative of progress and the concept of the annexation of reality. Both ideas find their full exposition in Kantor’s renunciation of representation or, as Kobialka reminds his reader, these performances prove that “art is an answer to, rather than a representation of reality” (34).

Kobialka poignantly describes how Kantor’s work on these two performances, under extreme conditions during the Nazi occupation of Poland, established his seminal conceptualizations of an object (poor object), performance space, and reality. In these circumstances the performance space, already mutilated and deformed by the dehumanization of war, reminded its inhabitants of the emptying out of reality and the total loss of its mimetic potential. The outside and the inside world became equally unreal, or in other terms, useless. But, as Kobialka stresses again and again in his book, in that space every simple act or object, such as Penelope sitting on a chair in The Return of Odysseus, regained its existential potential and human validity.

The five commentary chapters of the book, beginning with the “Topography of Representation,” draw a map of Kantor’s fascination with certain artistic trends and his points of departure. The most essential are his fascination with the object (relationship of the object to reality, objectness of the object, liberation of the object), preoccupation with the relation of space to reality, and of course his incessant involvement in the question of the performance space. These commentary chapters trace Kantor’s conceptualizations of the performance space from “the classroom,” “the room,” to an unstable, dystopian space suspended between reality and illusion, always deformed and disrupted, and always evading representation. Kobialka further shows Kantor’s frustration with the processes dominating contemporary culture: stabilization, consumption, and the appropriation by mainstream culture of all revolutionary artistic gestures.

Theoretical chapters stay in a dialogic relation to Kantor’s own texts, foregrounding the points of convergence and common threads running through all areas of his artistic activity. The editor’s commentary makes his reader see Kantor, from our 21st-century perspective, as a postmodern artist-theoretician par excellence, expressing his reflection in a performative way and approaching a dramatic text (as for instance, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz’s plays) as a starting point for the construction of another — a parallel performance text. In this sense, the editor’s commentary functions as just such a parallel text.

Interestingly, even though Kobialka presents Kantor as a postmodern artist — pointing to infiniteness, ambivalence, movement, and instability as signposts on his artistic journey — concepts such as emballage imply that there is still another side of Kantor, an incessant Romantic trying to hide a mysterious, unreachable “thingness” of the thing. Yet, the words of Kantor’s manifestos and poetic enunciations crumble and fold back upon themselves, showing that the unreachable appears only as a potential and a gesture of a quest that remains necessarily only a game. The evasive “thingness” can be only thought of in terms of the impossible, and if Kantor still...