Grzegorz Drozd is a representative of the generation which crea

Grzegorz Drozd is a representative of the generation which created its artistic works at the time

of political breakthrough between 1989 and 1991. The basic elements of the creativity were permanent alternation and a constant desire for something new. Together with Guy Debord we were able to speak about the ceaseless fascination of the spectacle of the “new” and new experiences, which referred to almost every aspect of social, political and cultural life. It is the constantly changing point of reference that defined the way of coexisting with art.

The beginning of postmodernism in the form of a tsunami was such a change. The tsunami wave flooded the whole of well-known society, and spread the then binding “great histories”, with the immediate result of numerous individual and unique stories. According to Jean-François Lyotard, the great history gave up its place to the variety of individual and unique stories. Lyotard defined these discussions as isolated “language games” (1), a description which echoed Ludwig von Wittgenstein’s conception. Wittgenstein used the notion of “language games” as a heuristic instrument applied to the analysis of defined simple elements of interpersonal communication. Modernism, together with its avant-garde and new avant-garde, withdraws within the framework of postmodernism, and in Lyotard’s words, lets the artist in the world of artistic language games. We deal with such language games in Grzegorz Drozd’s works, masterfully painted pictures, which are then freed from the apparent perfection into the imaginary imperfection, through his treatment in the understanding of his notion of art. There is no longer desire for modernism’s “great history”, but the attainment of an individual and artistic state of personal spectacle.

In Eastern Europe until the time of social change, the strong idea of avant-garde that survived in the new avant-garde of Eastern Europe, had changed a lot since that moment. Autoperception of avant-garde was also subordinated to the social and political changes, and social and cultural changes of the 90’s. Rigorous state order, restriction of the unconstrained artistic expression, and propagating the “pseudotruth”, in the sarcastic words of Gyula Pauer, in turn gave way to the form of unconstrained statehood, together with the consumer world transmitted by media.

Slavoj Žižek comments on today’s state of affairs, and directs his attention not only to the fabrication of ideology in contemporary societies, but also to the functioning of ideology in socialist realism.