Józef Robakowski My own cinema

The book contains an interview, Hans-Ulrich Obrist with Józef Robakowski, the texts by Łukasz Ronduda ("Józef Robakowski and a Film Form Workshop in the seventies"), Bożena Czubak ("Own Cinema"), Marek Nash ("A few notes on the works of Józef Robakowski"), biographical note, bibliography and artist's filmography.

In Robakowski’s ‘own cinema’ the act of exposing oneself, in one self or another, assumes the characteristics of a pop-cultural fantasy. In Art is Power!, separating mechanical gestures from the chanted slogans, Robakowski mocks ideological phantasms. In his more recent works, simple video recordings that bring to mind the notion of ‘home video’ emanate a sense of humour (Licking Meditations, 2007) or ironic distance (Little Pole, 2010), which are not absent from the artist’s earlier self-recordings and the artist image written in them. An image written also in time, combining an experimentalist and media analyst with an anarchical neo-Dadaist and avowed nihilist, an hear to avant-garde traditions with an enthusiast of cultural peripheries, a international festival-goer with an advocate of the ‘progressive Łódź scene’, a renowned pedagogue with a contester of institutional hierarchies, a finally prominent artist with an unceasingly fierce polemist.

Bożena Czubak