Zbigniew Dłubak. From A Constituted Sense To The Sense Constitution

The article is based upon his translation of a French text published in 1994. The text was part of a catalogue featuring an individual exhibition by Zbigniew Dlubak in Maison des expositions de Genas. There were some minimal changes introduced by the author to the original work entitled “Du sens constitué à la constitution du sens.” The text highlighted the originality of the artist's inspirations: on the one hand — similarly to other conceptualists in 1960-1970 — Dłubak was interested in semiotics and linguistics. However he was more captivated by Jakobson and Mukarowsky than Ayer and Wittgenstein. On the other hand, in a similar way to some 20th century painters, he intuitively discovered the procedures of phenomenology. Dlubak's contribution to conceptual art is based on a 'structural-painterly' approach to art, which is reminiscent of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. According to this French philosopher, language signs are 'forms in blanco'. For Dlubak, a work of art is an 'empty sign', which will acquire meaning during a process which Dlubak equaled with the work of art itself. The artist suggested an original—phenomenological—concept of aesthetic experience, which was based on the idea of stepping outside 'the world of meaning' in a search for the source where the sense of art is constituted. The discovery of the process in which the sense of art emerges and understanding its mechanisms, stand in opposition to aesthetic concepts, as these aesthetic concepts find the style as the main goal of art creation and assume that for an artist a specific style represents a specific way of thinking. Breaking away from the stylistic focus and from thinking in the categories of style, is one of the most significant elements of creation according to Dlubak; a style is an ossified and fossilised sense. One of his characteristic strategies, which is aimed at overcoming the category of style, is a parallel and concurrent use of painting and photography. He underlined the overlapping of artistic and cognitive processes and by doing so, Dlubak arrived at an original concept—not very new in the history of aesthetic thought—which sees art as ‘principle to the liveliness of one’s mind’