On the eighth of April 1978 Tadeusz Kantor was awarded the Rembrandt Prize for outstanding contributions to art. It might be expected that an artist, upon public recognition of his greatness, would have something to say concerning the essence of his art that might aid public understanding. However, Kantor's presentation of this manifesto represents a somewhat puzzling performance. Instead of thanking the international panel of the Goethe Foundation for the award, Kantor painted a strange picture of the artist ‘on trial’. The manifesto appears to end with a sort of disappearing act: Kantor stands before his audience and makes seemingly profound statements about fear and the nature of the artist; he attempts to redefine Dada for his audience and suddenly finds that he has turned himself into the accused, has become a schoolboy once again, has forgotten what he had to say and appears to fade away to the nothingness of the closing ellipsis.This discussion uses Kantor's ‘Little Manifesto’ to explore the problematic of the artist's experience in terms that parallel the concepts that Heidegger and Gadamer developed in their philosophy. It draws on certain themes from post-Heideggerian philosophy, in particular, Agamben's account of negativity in the metaphysics of presence and his radical critique of aesthetics. I will further suggest that, as well as providing a useful framework for ‘understanding Tadeusz Kantor’, such a philosophical hermeneutic framework resonates productively with Kantor's own aesthetic and metaphysical concerns in a way that more conventional frameworks based on the idea of art-as-representation do not.In his regression to childhood from the defiant stance at the beginning of the manifesto Kantor enacts a move from the status of award-winning artist to something more abject. But, paradoxically, that very state of humiliation in the return to the immaturity of childhood, and of the absence of memory, is a return to potentiality, and, this apparently humiliating regression becomes a potentially positive beginning rather than a humiliating end. As Kantor's ‘poor objects’ became a form of resistance against the threat of annihilation during the occupation, this regression to childhood and the potentiality of the informe of immaturity become a form of resistance, even though futile, against the encroachment of the final annihilation of death. It is as if by embracing the nothingness of forgetfulness as a conscious, intentional gesture, Kantor is able to suggest the potential continuation of the performance of himself.
Shaming Australia
