Untitled - Narodowe Centrum Kultury

tytuł artykułu 7
2
People
Aren’t Paint Tubes
Janusz Byszewski in conversation with
agata pietrzyk
Agata Pietrzyk: When someone asks me what I do for a living, I tell
them I’m a culture animator. It is an answer I give with conviction, but
it took me some time before I was ready to say this, to define myself.
When people want to know what exactly culture animation is, I have
to give them examples, making connections between different areas,
different forms of activity.
I say I work in cultural education, running community, cultural
and artistic projects. On the one hand, I find it interesting that a culture
animator works somewhere at the intersection of all these fields.
On the other, I believe culture animation is a postmodern discipline,
one that draws freely from all areas of culture, all areas of the arts.
The animators, when thinking about themselves, use some
sort of catchwords, tags. They make it more specific by saying their
work has to do with museums, theatre, photography, community projects
etc.
Janusz Byszewski: I’ve been asked similar questions hundreds of
times – about what I do, what I am: an artist, critic, animator, art
educator... This isn’t the most important question. It serves to force
a definition, make the world seem more orderly than it is. Take art,
for example. Just as you can’t give one definition of art, you can’t say
precisely what a culture animator is. It is an open field, defined differently
in different contexts and at different moments, and, most
importantly, one that is always pushing its own boundaries. This idea
of crossing boundaries is very important. It expresses the dynamic of
the situation. I’m not much interested in providing complete definitions,
although I have the exact same problem when answering questions
about my profession.
Your question also implies a different issue: Do art and culture
animation inspire each other How do they permeate each other According
to the traditional model we all learn at school, the artist is
someone who has talent, seeks inspiration and studies technique in
order to translate her experiences into forms that we call works of art.
On top of that, she often serves an important social or patriotic
mission. This Romantic myth of the artist is still alive, especially in
this part of Europe.
However, culture animators must first of all define themselves
before they can define their field of values, determine what social
groups and spaces they want to work with. In this sense they are postmodern.
What the artist and the animator have in common is definitely
the need to be able to choose freely which areas they want to
work in, the freedom to decide... But there’s one important difference:
the artist first of all thinks about her own freedom while the animator
focuses on facilitating that freedom for other people. The animator
knows that this is the only way for new values, ideas and gestures
important for their collaborators to emerge...