IMPOSSIBLE COLLECTION

The Impossible Collection 2021 – Nomus Is Reflected in a Shattered Mirror
The appearance of a collection is a painstaking and unpredictable process because
its assumed goals and areas to which it directs its attention are constantly being revised.
What seems the most important is the adoption of a “non-market” stance of collected
works which means such a selection of art pieces which does not converge with options
and trends imposed by the art market. For all the years we have been active, we have
been convicted of the necessity to build alternative sets of values in art. The evaluation of
a work of art by means of financial tools seems to be too omnipotent and it occupies our
imagination, paralysing our decisions on finding different tools for evaluation. Slavoj
Žižek describes the relations between products of culture with horrifying brutality
which, however, perversely only reinforce our determination not to reproduce
such mechanisms.
With the turn to third sector economies (services, cultural goods) — Žižek
emphasises (note by G.K.) — that culture is becoming less and less a specific
sphere excluded from the market, but instead, not only one of the spheres of the
market but even its centrepiece (from the industry of entertainment software to
other media productions). This short clash between art and culture embraces the
decline of the old, modernist avant-garde logic of provocation and the shocking of
the establishment. Today, the cultural-economical apparatus itself must not only
be more and more tolerant but even directly provoke ever more shocking effects
and products if it wants to reproduce itself under the conditions of market
competition. 1
Art as a luxury good which is extravagantly shocking is a tempting object of
desire. However, we do not desire to feed our imagination on it, nor does it
promise us anything which we might find inspiring in the future. The results of
artists’ efforts, emerging from their actions, not focused only on market or media
success, have become the fuel for acting and creating the relations of experience
open to risk. This means not only material pieces of art but also ephemeral
experience which we “have” in the form of documents and other records. What is
exceptionally important is the performative “content” in the form of dispersed
collections of images, subjectively glued into a whole by viewers-interactors. The
collection is orchestrated into thousands of amateur personal recordings and
photographs taken during a tour of the Subjective Bus Line 2 or the 15-year-long

Media><Narrations workshops in the now non-existent Modelarnia [Mock-Up
Hall] 3 on the premises of the former Gdańsk Shipyard. For more than 30 years,
Wyspa has “produced” images influencing our collective and individual
imagination, something like a vaccination shot immunising us against the
omnipotent spectacle of consumption. Quoting the pessimistic words of Guy
Debord:
[…] The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among
people, mediated by images. […] It is not an addition to the real world, an
attached decoration. It is the very core of irrealism of real society. In all of its
particular forms: information or propaganda, advertising or direct consumption of
entertainment, it is now the model of socially dominating life. 4

The commodification of an artist’s expression and their need for
insubordination and creative independence is the biggest challenge for both art
institutions and artists themselves. This management of art production pushes
and distorts the sense of a creative act, making it similar to mass production for
the eye-level shelving, steered by class violence. This is capital that is not
symbolic but measurable with currency and tools of political pressure. We ask
ourselves the questions: Who collects art and why? What is the purpose of
collecting and classifying it? What becomes of these resources? A collection is
stocks, stocks are depots, warehouses, and, finally, archives — these accruing
methods of placing and locating works create unsettling obligations. States of
possession generate stages of personality — the transgression of the horizon of
the present. To use the thought of Arlette Farge:
[...] “The archive is not a warehouse which you can take out for pleasure —
it is a constant lack — sometimes even helplessness because you do not know
what to do with it. […] It is history in progress the outcome of which is never fully
graspable,” and she goes on to add: “The archive destroys ready-made
pictures”. 5
Does a collection — a sum of senses — destroy the currency of reading?
Does it protect us from haphazard judgements, intellectual fashions and tools
which get worn out? Whoever owns a collection wields power over the collective
imagination and symbolic space, controls memory and can freely construct it.
The idea of the Impossible Collection appeared in the now non-existent Wyspa
Institute of Art after its enforced closure in 2016 with the participation of the
authorities and the developer 6 ; in its place NOMUS was created — a branch of
the National Museum in Gdańsk, where a collection of contemporary art is being
created. The cannibalistic gesture of the state administration devouring an
independent organisation will certainly produce a new narration, create new
histories and delineate new maps of art.
So, let us see the country where dozens of small, alternative collections
operate, which can jointly face the dominance of centralised institutions —
museum corporations; this is the collection which we are trying to build.
Grzegorz Klaman , Gdańsk 2015-2021