Engine roar in the museum

Transkrypt

Engine roar in the museum
Dorota Jędruch
“We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly
fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that
devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke
(...) because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists,
ciceroni and antiquarians.”
Tomasso Marinetti, Manifesto of Futurism, 1909
City and memory usually go in opposite directions. Perfect cities growing from coarse roots,
predatory industrial cities, cities of insane fortunes and gold rush, cities of revolution and upheavals, cities of here and now, cities of force, power, movement and speed, cities of residential
settlements and corporate offices emerge and spread without looking back. They cough up
tonnes of waste, strange objects, unnecessary equipment, unused outfits, rachitic machines,
photography overproduction, post cards and individual memories that find their extra-temporal
solace in museum halls.
City and museum have contradictory interests: they enter into conflicts, but they usually consider
one another with aloof indifference; the museum is a pensive, hunched old man, while the city is
a cheeky, pimply kid.
Let us try to combine those two spaces for a moment. La ville Louvre (The Louvre City), an excellent film from 1990 by Nicolas Philibert, shows the French museum as a huge structure with its
own transportation, rhythm, street network, diversified society, secrets, nooks and crannies. As
probably any form of social activity, a museum can be described as a structure similar to a city.
Following the guidelines Kevin Lynch included in the book, The Image of the City, I suggest sightseeing a virtual museum city based on several elements enabling identification in the geometric
and semantic space. Combined with invisible paths, the exhibits will therefore mark roads, the
lines which one travels along; junctions, the places where various forms of space intersect with
one another; landmarks, the points according to which one determines one’s position in space;
areas, the surfaces separated in the city network; and edges, the barriers and elements crossing the space. However, one has to remember that the best form of walking around the city is to
become lost in it just like a 19th century flâneur.
Extra materials:
Fragment of the Metropolis film, 1927, directed by Fritz Lang, http://youtu.be/5PAdQ5anhZE (access: 25
March 2013).
Kevin Lynch and the Image of the City documentary, directed by Ewan Mather, American Portraits, produced by Western Pennsylvania Public Television, WQPA 76 Waynesburgh, 2006, http://youtu.be/OHwbRLu0ymo (access: 25 March 2013).
Bibliography:
K. Lynch, Obraz miasta (The Image of the City), translated by T. Jeleński, Krakow, 2012.
A. Zeidler-Janiszewska, Dryfujący flâneur, czyli o sytuacjonistycznym doświadczeniu miejskiej przestrzeni
[in:] Przestrzeń, filozofia i architektura, E. Rewers (ed.), Studia kulturoznawcze, vol. 12, Poznań, 1999,
http://bylecoq.w.interia.pl/text/flaneur.htm (access: 25 March 2013).
www.muzea.malopolska.pl
Glass ashtray
History of Photography Museum (Muzeum Historii Fotografii)
Area
Nearly a hundred years ago, a health resort visitor purchased a fairly unoriginal souvenir in
Krynica. The transparent and shiny bottom of the ashtray features, similar to a prehistoric bug set
in amber, a photograph with the memory of a city fragment. A hot afternoon, sapphire-blue sky,
intensive sun warming the walls of an elegant hotel where it is said that parties were attended by
Marshal Piłsudski himself, the memory of something that never happened.
Tourist souvenirs, such as a miniature Eiffel Tower of Paris, Vatican Basilica in a glass bowl with
snowflakes, and a pen with a Venetian gondola moving in the casing, are the modest treasures
worth several pennies that manifest the results of travel becoming more and more democratic.
At the time to which the ashtray dates back many European countries introduced paid employee
leaves (in Poland it took place in 1922), which started the era of mass tourism. We often visit the
sites quickly, absent-mindedly, one might even say industrially. We visit snapshot cities and kaleidoscope cities that make one giddy after being found in colourful brochures. Bought in a hurry,
the semi-transparent Dada object with the embedded memory of someone else is to preserve
the non-existing moment forever.
Tourist railway
Krakow Salt Works Museum (Muzeum Żup Krakowskich)
Road
Let us imagine a journey to the centre of the Earth, just like in Jules Verne’s novel. A horse-drawn
tramway crosses the underground landscape of an ancient salt mine. Today, the Wieliczka Mine
is one of the greatest tourist attractions of Poland; it has been open to visitors as early as the 19th
century.
The journey in an elegant railway, with the preservation of the right hierarchy where the noblest
sit on comfortable plush seats, slightly resembles visiting a modern amusement park. In 1883, in
his novel depicting 20th-century Paris, André Robida presents a tram journey in a museum of art.
In an hour, one encounters various schools of European painting, while five-minute stops allow
one to become acquainted with every work.
The century of steam and electricity brought many concepts of city vehicles, such as airborne
trams, balloon taxis and railways running vertically along the walls of skyscrapers. Learning the
city, or just learning, became an insane rush through the land of adventure or a funfair. One often
sees the city in motion for a fraction of a second from the window of one’s vehicle. When observed in this way, it becomes a vast, vertiginous and evanescent performance.
Extra materials:
Journey through the city with a subway network:
R.E.M.-UBerlin, http://youtu.be/PN1YpMtPIpE (access: May 2012).
Amusement Park in Coney Island, 1917 – city as an amusement park, “Fatty” Arbuckle and Buster Keaton, film http://youtu.be/U6-H06G7eiE (access: May 2012). Trolleybus in New York, route towards the
Broadway and Union Square intersection – beginning of the 20th century, http://youtu.be/954L9MpfCEo
(access: 25 March 2013).
Figure 1
Jumbled district, illustration from: André Robida, La vie électrique: Le vingtième siècle, Librairie illustrée,
Paris, 1883, p. 129.
Figure 2
Airborne taxi stop at St. Hyacinth in Paris, illustration from: André Robida, La vie électrique: Le vingtième
siècle, Librairie illustrée, Paris, 1883, p. 71.
Figure 3
On the roofs, illustration from: André Robida, La vie électrique: Le vingtième siècle, Librairie illustrée,
Paris, 1883, p. 61.
Figure 4
Tramway in the Louvre, illustration from: André Robida, La vie électrique: Le vingtième siècle, Librairie illustrée, Paris, 1883, p. 74.
Bibliography:
J. Verne, Podróż do środka ziemi (Journey to the Centre of the Earth), 1864 (several Polish editions).
A. Robida, Le vingtieme siècle. Roman d’une persienne – la vie electrique, Paris, 1883.
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k57466170.r=robida.langFR (access: May 2012).
Camera/ Mr Daguerr’s invention
Cricoteka Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor (Ośrodek Dokumentacji
Sztuki Tadeusza Kantora Cricoteka)
Edge
“I wanted to make a black-and-white film with a hand-cranked camera. Just like Buster Keaton in
The Camera Man. Crossing the streets alone. Like a resurrected Dziga Vertov!
I really love this city. Lisbon! For most of the time I truly saw it...
right in front of my eyes.
But pointing a camera is like pointing a gun. Every time I set it I felt as if life was escaping from
the substance. I shot and I shot... but with every turn of the old crank the city was retreating...
vanishing even further and further.” (Wim Wenders, Lisbon Story)
The city is a succession of images with background music. It comprises collage views, objects,
events and situations that are elusive and subjective just like human memory. It is hard to count
the oral, literary, painting, and film stories about cities. We register the city’s functioning just as
we try to register our life. City is a great metaphor for lasting and passing.
The old-fashioned I-will-change-into-a-machine-gun camera from Kantor’s play takes turns to
photograph and to kill. It preserves in memory and annihilates. Wielopole at the time of Kantor’s
childhood was an intimate space for memories, a reference point and a matrix. We can easily
imagine a small Galician town, people and buildings in sepia colour. The photographer sets the
magic box on long legs, the street becomes immobile and the passers-by freeze in seemingly
natural poses. At that time in order to make a good photograph, the whole street had to freeze
for a moment to freeze forever.
Extra materials:
Man with the Movie Camera, 1929, directed by Dziga Vertov, film, http://youtu.be/Iey9YIbra2U (access:
May 2012).
The Camera Man, directed by Buster Keaton, 1928, http://youtu.be/zo85hdekH4w (access: May 2012).
Lisbon Story, directed by Wim Wenders, 1994
Women and Men with a Mobile Camera, documentary resulting from the workshops inspired by Dziga
Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera and prepared by ConCritLab and the National Museum in Krakow
on the occasion of the Photomonth Festival in Krakow,
16-26 May 2012, http://vimeo.com/43662098 (access: May 2012).
Documentary about the preparation of Wielopole, Wielopole play, http://youtu.be/aRl1MhIZNjU (access:
May 2012).
Figure 5
Wdowa po miejscowym fotografie firmy Ricardo – ponury agent śmierci (Widow of the local photographer from the Ricardo company – death’s grim agent), a drawing by Tadeusz Kantor illustrating a scene
from Wielopole, Wielopole play, 1981.
Figure 5a
Tadeusz Kantor, a drawing related to Wielopole, Wielopole play, 1980, lightly painted photograph glued
onto a black cardboard with the author’s inscription, property of the Cricoteka Archives.
Bibliography:
Galicja. Opowiadać dalej?, edited by M. Kozień, M. Miskowiec, Krakow, 2011.
Wedding ring
Irena and Mieczysław Mazaraki Museum in Chrzanów (Muzeum im. Ireny i Mieczysława Mazarakich w Chrzanowie)
Junction
“If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill! Let my tongue stick to the roof of my
mouth if I don’t remember you.” (Psalm 137: 5)
Jewish wedding rings are usually crowned with a simple model of a house. But the ring preserved in Chrzanów depicts, at this place, the symbolic buildings of Jerusalem. The lost house.
How far is it from Chrzanów to Jerusalem? What is the distance that separates the multicultural
city heated with the southern sun and scented with thyme and mint from the Central European
town where a hundred years ago unknown spouses built their homes? Maybe there is no distance here, but only two sides of the same thing? The promise city, the archetype city, the matrix
city – Jerusalem exists simultaneously in many dimensions. It is reality and imagination, earthliness and eternity, realisation and ideal, failure and hope. Our civilisation is founded on nostalgia
for the perfect city that makes the real city always seem like an anagram of that perfect city.
Extra materials:
Tower of David Museum of the History of Jerusalem, www.towerofdavid.org.il (access: May 2012).
(the website offers an audio guide in several languages – I recommend listening to the 4th fragment of the
guide describing the panorama of the historical part of Jerusalem),
www.jhom.com (access: May 2012).
Bibliography:
Z. Paszkowski, Miasto idealne w perspektywie europejskiej i jego związki z urbanistyką współczesną,
Krakow, 2011.
Christ on a palm donkey
National Museum in Krakow (Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie)
Road
At what point, time and space is Jerusalem located? It is definitely not a static element, although
it has been a travel destination for ages. It is rather reminiscent of a place described to Kublai
Khan by Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The traveller describes to the emperor his
vast empire and extraordinary cities that adorn it like precious incrustations. These are not real
places, but spatial structures weaved by memory, desires, meetings, and symbols. Jerusalem, the
city of eight gates inside which the stories about the beginning and end of everything that we
consider real take place on a single square kilometre. One day the Messiah will enter through the
Golden Gate to herald the end of the world, and Christ is also supposed to have entered the city
at this gate.
Since the Middle Ages, on Palm Sunday, many cities of Northern Europe have held processions
where, posed as an emperor, sculpted Christ on a donkey went to the temple. For a while this
great folk holiday changed the city’s topography into the equivalent of ancient Jerusalem as a
spiritual and mental structure outside of time and space.
Extra materials:
Krzysztof Penderecki, Siedem bram Jerozolimy (Seven Gates of Jerusalem) (1996), a piece written for the
celebration of the 3000th anniversary of the city’s founding.
Fragment of the Siedem bram Jerozolimy (Seven Gates of Jerusalem) performance in Teatr Wielki in November 2008, directed by Jarosław Mankowicz, Tomasz Bagiński, http://youtu.be/aG618LN-MLM (access:
May 2012).
Palm Sunday procession in Tokarnia, http://youtu.be/BTDnfHCHHAU (access: May 2012).
Bibliography:
Marco Polo, Opisanie świata (Description of the World), translated by Anna Ludwika Czerny, 4th edition,
Wydawnictwo W.A.B., Warsaw, 2010.
Italo Calvino, Niewidzialne miasta (Invisible Cities), Collegium Columbinum, Krakow, 2005 (1st Polish edition in 1975).
Włodzimierz Pawluczuk, Wierszalin. Reportaż o końcu świata, Pracownia Krajoznawcza Oddziału Uniwersyteckiego PTTK, Warsaw, 1983.
A view of krakow from the south, as seen from the krakus mound
Historical Museum of the City of Krakow (Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa)
Landmark
The end of the 16th century marked the development of cartography, including attempts at an
exact projection of the better and better known world that would replace the fantastic description of cities brought by travellers, together with jewellery. Civitates Orbis Terrarum (Atlas of
the Cities of the World), a collection published in Cologne in 1617 and offering 350 views, such
as panoramas, plans, bird’s-eye views, of the then most important cities in Europe, Asia, Africa
and even America, also contains views of Krakow. The medieval city with soaring church towers
and the dominant Wawel Castle spans over a vast cityscape that is now hardly visible. There are
various records of historical phases of city development, such as modern panoramas made with
the use of photographic techniques, mock-ups (like a collection of mock-ups of French fortresses
dating back to the time of Louis XIV), dioramas, as well as extraordinary virtual, or even threedimensional, visualisations. They allow us to travel in time to cities so real that their views surpass
even the most gripping stories.
Extra materials:
Walery Rzewuski, Widok ogólny Krakowa od południa, 1860 (one of the first photographs of Krakow
made on three colloidal films, where three prints were merged into one panoramic image). What is preserved is the lithograph made on the basis of this photograph.
Present-day panorama of Krakow from the Krakus Mound,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Panorama_Krakowa_z_Kopca_Krakusa.jpg (25
March 2013).
Links: Musée des Plans reliefs – museum of mock-ups of French fortresses from the time of Louis XIV,
www.museedesplansreliefs.culture.fr/ (access: May 2012).
Virtual reconstruction of the city – Krakow as it was 1000 years ago, http://youtu.be/Gz2_BatjU2s (access:
May 2012).
Bibliography:
Michał Krupa, Panoramy miast zabytkowych – ochrona i kształtowanie, Czasopismo Techniczne,
Wydawnictwo Politechniki Krakowskiej (Publishing House of the Cracow University of Technology), 3A2009, issue No. 13, year 106, http://suw.biblos.pk.edu.pl/resources/i1/i8/i6/i1/r1861/KrupaM_PanoramyMiast.pdf (access: May 2012).
Counter for the accessories of the city council’s scribe
Area
The first references to the Krakow City Council date back to the times soon after the city’s foundation in 1257. Since the 15th century the Council comprised 24 persons and was headed by
the mayor. After the fall of this office at the end of the 18th century, it was later restored in 1866.
The City Council traditionally held administrative power, watched over order and safety, passed
decisions on trade, measurements and weights, and craft guilds, levied taxes, sent representatives with petitions to the king, and performed partial judiciary functions. Consisting of the city’s
particiate, it held a truly oligarchic power over the city. City democracy was never deeply rooted
in Poland. This phenomenon may be emphatically symbolised by Zamość, a simulacrum of municipal republic and aristocratic whim with an impressive town hall as a stage design element.
Who possesses a city, the traditional area of freedom? Should the inhabitants have their say in
settling major expenses and city decisions? The right to the city, that is having a good life, deciding about one’s own surroundings and assuming responsibility for it, is one of the key postulates
of modern city communities.
Extra materials:
Krakow’s City Hall portal dedicated to public consultations, http://www.dialogspoleczny.krakow.pl/ (access: 25 March 2013).
Social conflicts in the city: Bob Marley, Burnin’ and Lootin, a song used in the credits of the film La Haine
(Hatred) directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995. A film about social conflicts in the suburbs of Paris.
Bibliography:
D. Harvey, Bunt miast. Prawo do miasta i miejska rewolucja (Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the
Urban Revolution), Warsaw, 2012.
A chest from the tailor’s guild and related guilds
Aleksander Kłosiński Museum in Kęty (Muzeum im. Aleksandra Kłosińskiego w Kętach)
Landmark
The movement of the counter was usually accompanied with music, and attended by invited
guests and representatives from the city authorities. During such a ceremony, appropriate
speeches were delivered to honour the previous guild master, while removing the counter and
welcoming the newly elected master at the threshold of his house. “Such festivities often lasted
up to three days,” describes Aleksander Kłosiński, the originator of the local museum’s collection,
in his unpublished chronicle of the history of Kęty.
The counter or treasure, that is the guild chest, held statutes, letters, insignia, stamps and money.
These old chests entrusted to the care of patron saints featured secret recesses and hiding
places. Organised into professional corporations, the craftsmen had constituted an extremely
important community within the city since the Middle Ages. They defended fortifications, set up
criteria for the quality of goods and organised a system of professional education. In Kęty the
weavers, drapers, cobblers and tailors were building up the town’s identity until the 19th century.
They dictated the terms, until the mechanical weaving factories in the nearby town of Biała swept
away this everlasting municipal order in no time.
Extra materials:
Brochure about the figure of Aleksander Kłosiński and the museum named after him in Kęty.
http://dnidziedzictwa.pl/wp-content/uploads/guide/kety.pdf (25 March 2013).
Film about the Aleksander Kłosiński Museum in Kęty, in preparation for the 13th edition of the Małopolska
Days of Cultural Heritage, http://youtu.be/81UMjpbjxMk (25 March 2013).
Illustrations to the Baltasar Behem Codex, 16th century Krakow notary, collections of the Jagiellonian
Library in Krakow.
Wax seal of the royal-imperial district staroste
City Museum in Wadowice (Muzeum Miejskie w Wadowicach)
Area
The mysterious Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria was not a land of cities, but that of towns.
The neglected, antiquated towns, situated along bumpy roads, among fields and woods in the
periphery of civilisation, comprise the modern myth of Galicia. According to surreal rules, the
region was ruled by some kind of moustached King Ubu. The place seemed to be a strange
patchwork of cultures sewn together into a multi-patterned composition.
As the local royal imperial officer, the district staroste of Wadowice ruled the lands of Wadowice,
Andrychów, Zator, Lanckorona and Kalwaria, executed bureaucratic regulations and ensured
liaison between the colony and the metropolis.
In the great industrialisation race of that time, European cities swelled and sprawled multiplying
their population, annexing everything on their way and pushing the landscape aside. Change appeared quite slow here. However, the small railway stations (often inoperative today) allowed one
to set off for Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Paris, and even a conquest of the New World.
“Krakow” model locomotive
In 1847, the first railway line in Galicia from Krakow to Mysłowice was opened together with its
branch leading to the partition border. In its vertiginous rush the asthmatic monster cut through
the painful borders and eternal limitations. In the middle of the 19th century trains could ride at
a speed of up to 60 km/h, which is much more than the speed of the rabbit in the famous Turner
painting. Railways changed towns, equipping them with new palaces and territories. Thanks to
trains, the town could overflow its own boundaries and spread freely to form suburbs. Railways
changed the endless landscape of woods, roads, cities and towns forever. Everywhere in the
world people started to work on the construction of a great network of connections. The world
became a great city network with no beginning and no end. Travelling by train reminds one of
the great geographical discoveries: it is a journey into one’s own self, while the distance, speed,
otherness, accessibility and roots all become relative. Living here and now is no longer a necessity, but a kind of probability. The characteristic rattle of the train beats a rhythm for the industrial
age city.
Extra materials:
Tajemnice żelaznych maszyn (Secrets of the iron machines), 2009, documentary depicting the history of
Polish railways, http://youtu.be/hFp0CW-OwQQ (access: May 2012).
The Double Life of Véronique, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1991 (fragment), http://youtu.be/zStjIXfC1cA (access: May 2012).
Tom Waits, Downtown train, http://youtu.be/ja2evWhGWHA (access: May 2012).
Film promoting the railway route to New York (New York Central Railroad) in the 1950s,
http://youtu.be/5HTLmMnwSY0 (25 March 2013).
Train rushing along the Paris-Berlin route (view from the cockpit) – 320 km/h, http://youtu.be/v056krBzgZI
(access: May 2012).
Website on the history of iron railways in Galicia, http://www.kkstb.pl/linie-kolejowe-galicji/ (access: May
2012).
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed. The Great Western Railway, 1844, National Gallery, London.
Giorgio de Chirico, Piazza d’Italia, 1913, oil on canvas, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada.
Claude Monet, a series of St. Lazarus Station views in Paris, 1877.
Bibliography:
L. Mazan, 150 lat dróg żelaznych w Galicji, Krakow-Warsaw, 1997.
KRAKOW, SZCZEPAŃSKI SQUARE, NORTHERN FRONTAGE
History of Photography Museum (Muzeum Historii Fotografii)
Area
“One guy said that in Warsaw it was totally passé, that’s what he said: passé. He added that this
place had, of course, been fashionable, but it was not anymore. You just had to be there! But you
don’t anymore. (...) (My colleagues from Warsaw all said that) in Krakow they liked that they could
go to Charlotte wearing, for example, a checked shirt tucked inside their trousers (...) and no one
would kick them out with a glare; in Warsaw if you are not wearing clothes worth at least a couple
thousand and a beautifully shaved head, don’t bother touching the door handle.”
Wojciech Nowicki, Dindemajo w Charlotte. Wielkie żarcie Nowickiego, Gazeta Wyborcza,
http://krakow.gazeta.pl/krakow/1,87945,11798272,Wielkie_zarcie_Nowickiego__Dindemajo_w_Charlotte.html (access: June 2012).
A new fashionable bistro has recently opened at Szczepański Square. The metropolitan society
can drink coffee, eat a baguette, and look at the opposite side of the square at its ‘skyscraper’,
that is a beautiful Art Déco building adjacent to a low pseudo-historical townhouse. This is where
Chicago meets Vienna, Galician parochialism meets large-city aspiration. Look at the same fragment of Krakow in a photograph from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (first photographs of
Krakow date back to the 1850s): busy traders hover around rather not very reliable stalls. At that
time, the square was a marketplace for clay pots, charcoal, salt lumps, brooms, meat and vegetables. The market is the pulse of the city where the vegetable fair meets the city’s vanity fair.
Extra materials:
Figures 6–9
Szczepański Square today, photo by Dorota Jędruch
Bibliography:
W. Mossakowska, A. Zeńczak, Kraków na starej fotografii, Krakow, 1984.
“Sheaves of corn against the background of a combine” photograph
Junction
Furry stacks similar to Monet’s give way to the majestic combine reminiscent of the futurist visions
of cities by Antonio Sant’Elia. The city devours the country, industry attacks agriculture, while
the voracious modernity consumes the quiet idyllic tradition. As a result of political decisions,
on the fertile lands of twenty different villages, a vast city emerges. Many narratives, stories and
memories belong to this unusual social history of the construction and residence of this place.
As a city type, Nowa Huta could be placed in various drawers of the perfect city, a city built on
coarse roots, workers and patronage settlement, an industrial city associated with the concepts
of Tony Garnier. Building a city from scratch is not, after all, a new phenomenon in the history of
urban planning. As Robert Moses, the architect who built the dense network of motorways in the
US, said: “I just want to build. It is your problem how to stop me.” (Les faiseurs de villes, T. Paquot
(ed.), Infolio editions, 2010, p. 335) Urbanisation is not only a process: it can sometimes become
a voracious element.
Extra materials:
Multimedia materials and documentation about the history of the Nowa Huta district, http://www.nhpedia.pl/ (25 March 2013).
Nowa Huta. Labirynt Pamięci (Nowa Huta. Labyrinth of Memory), directed by Marcin Kaproń, 37 minutes,
Historical Museum of the City of Krakow, 2009, http://youtu.be/qpWPrtR5X74 (access: May 2012).
Ziemia obiecana (The Promised Land), directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1974, http://youtu.be/qekSPFoeEGw
(access: May 2012).
Krakow and Nowa Huta: Świetliki, Opluty, http://youtu.be/ZMgUmbUY8Gg (access: May 2012).
Andrzej Wróblewski, Fajrant w Nowej Hucie, 1954, oil on canvas, personal property
Bibliography:
Kazimierz Wejchert, Ludzie nowego miasta o sobie i swoich losach, Instytut Urbanistyki i Planowania
Przestrzennego Politechniki Warszawskiej (Institute of Urban and Spatial Planning of the Warsaw University of Technology), 1992.
Coffee grinder
Maria Kozaczkowa’s Municipal Library in Dąbrowa Tarnowska (The Cultural Meeting Centre in
Dąbrowa Tarnowska)
Junction
The first coffee shops appeared in Istanbul in the 16th century, in London in the 17th century, and
in Poland only in the 18th century. But a modern city does not exist without coffee serving as
fuel; it is one of the attributes of the city lifestyle (urbanism) and a symbol of the constant rush
(espresso). Coffee accompanies mornings, offices, stations and bars. Brilliant inventions, poems,
or historical notes are often drafted on coffee napkins. The right to coffee shops is one of the
components of the right to the city. As Henri Lefebvre wrote: “Places assigned for movement and
meetings, such as street, cafe, stations, stadiums, have more meaning and purpose in everyday
life than the points they are leading to.” (H. Lefebvre, Du rural à l’urbain, Paris, 1970, p. 96) A
place deprived of any coffee shop seems to be a non-place and non-city.
Extra materials:
Adria Cafe in Warsaw, 1930s, http://youtu.be/5yK82sxs9Mg (access: May 2012).
Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago.
Ignacy łukasiewicz’s distillation apparatus
Ignacy Łukasiewicz Regional Museum of the Polish Tourist and Sightseeing Society in Gorlice
(Muzeum Regionalne PTTK im. Ignacego Łukasiewicza w Gorlicach)
Junction
In 1853 in the small Chorówka village near Krosno, Ignacy Łukasiewicz distilled paraffin out of
crude oil. The lamp model of his design shone for the first time in the display of Mikolasch’s shop
in Lviv, and soon, thanks to the artificial light of oil lamps, the first night-time emergency operation was performed in the city. The night light changed the rhythm of life for the city and its inhabitants. The number of crimes and accidents decreased. Soon a petrol engine emerged as the
heart of the city’s new bloodstream forming the network of streets, motorways and air corridors.
The stories of cities spurting out of the ground with the discovery of crude oil deposits are extraordinary, as if this uninteresting goo not only powered mechanical vehicles and installations,
but also provided people with heroic strength to build their fortunes, palaces and influences. The
second fraction of the city was usually populated by regular inhabitants, that is, workers, clerks,
beggars and adventurers, who filled the piecework decorations with their bustle.
Extra materials:
Oil route, http://www.beskidniski.org.pl/szlaki/naftowy/szlak_naftowy.htm (access: May 2012).
Ghost cities (deserted cities that grew around a past idea, e.g. American cities of the gold rush era),
http://www.topito.com/top-10-des-villes-fantomes-quon-a-envie-de-traverser (access: May 2012).
Dance
National Museum in Krakow (Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie)
City and dance form an entrancing couple. City is rhythmic and energetic. It is in constant movement. It throbs and flickers. City is highly mobile, it is a moving sculpture.
Just as the shapes in her graphic works, two organic figures of Maria Jarema’s sculpture move
in an undefined space and annex a section of the museum hall just for its own needs. They
originate from the Krakow circle of artistic bohemians of the 1930s, the circle of experimenting
artists. They stem from the Cricot theatre, surrealistic art accompanied by the music of Stravinsky,
Prokofiev and Milhaud. They must have been drafted here, stopped in a dancing gesture. They
illustrate the movement of the city of art. If they were moved from the abstract avant-garde space
into the world of the 1950s night cabaret, they would feel at home dancing to the rhythm of the
city at night.
Extra materials:
Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-1943, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York
(information: www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=78682, access: 25 March 2013).
The abstract vision of a boogie-woogie era city became an inspiration to develop images of a city in motion:
Broadway Boogie-Woogie, own animation developed as the thesis of RMIT University students in Australia: http://youtu.be/4b85UBqUy28 (access: 25 March 2013).
Boogie-Woogie Remix
http://youtu.be/zZp7ndjzf_k (access: 25 March 2013).
Broadway Boogie-Woogie
http://youtu.be/aYL79Ad12v4 (animation presenting Mondrian’s work and a fragment of Hieronymus
Bosch’s painting) (access: 25 March 2013).
Broadway Boogie-Woogie
http://youtu.be/DstjgGd7mds (access: 25 March 2013).
Mondrian jazz
http://youtu.be/4ChAf5MfRVs (access: 25 March 2013).
Belweder black-and-white tv set, ot 1782
Municipal Engineering Museum in Krakow (Muzeum Inżynierii Miejskiej w Krakowie)
Junction
In the old cities, news was shouted by a crier (bellman) who stood in the most popular places
and announced the news of past wars, news of peace, and overdue divorces. For many years, the
radio, and then the TV replaced the crier. Today the message is divided into many voices on the
Internet.
Mass media turn the city into a gigantic village where rumours spread at a vertiginous pace,
people spy on their neighbours and, gradually, we all become the same. The cities from Marco
Polo’s travels involved a secret, a magical story of seeing, remembering and forgetting. Many
cities remain forever unknown to all, just like most of the trees in the wood. The information cities
constitute an open secret, a complex structure where one object is mixed with the other and reality with fiction. The new media city, full of messages, whispers tempting our senses and relative
truths, has been trapped in its own net.
Dorota Jędruch (1977) – an art historian, currently writing her PhD thesis in the Institute of
Art History at the Jagiellonian University. She is interested in modern architecture (particularly
its social aspect) and contemporary art. She regularly works with the Autoportret (Self-Portrait)
magazine. She is a member of the board of the Institute of Architecture Foundation. She works
for the Education Section of the National Museum in Krakow.

Engine roar in the museum

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