Not to be a machine. The philosophical interpretation of the status of the spatial object in the Hasior’s art

Abstract

The article focuses on the issue of the autonomy of Hasior’s art in relation to pop art and neo dadaism. The starting point for the author is a polemic with the theses espoused by Polish art historians: both those who wrote their texts in the Polish People’s Republic (in years of its existence 1952–1989 ) and those who created a discourse on Hasior in the 1990s and the first decade of 21st century. The aim of this article is to extract Hasior’s individual artistic gesture by analyzing the way in which he used the material and spatial objects. An important moment of this text is the analysis of selected works by Robert Rauschenberg (Hasior was sometimes known as a “European Rauschenberg,” which is partly simplifying, but also to some extent beneficial to clarifying the interpretation of the possible meanings of the phrase) and contrasting them with the works by the author of Flaming Birds. A philosophical dimension of both pop art and Hasior’s art is inferred in this text by reference to the philosophy of Arthur C. Danto.