Tadeusz Kantor | Panoramiczny happening morski

Tadeusz Kantor
Panoramiczny happening morski 
Koszalin, Poland : Koszalińskie Towarzystwo Społeczno-Kulturalne, 1967
16 pp., 16 x 58 cm., staple-bound
Edition size unknown


The photograph of Tadeusz Kantor's Sea Concerto sits alongside Yves Klein's Leap Into The Void and Carolee Schneemann's Interior Scroll as one of the most iconic images of performative art. In the work, the artist Edward Krasiński stands in the Baltic Sea on a partially submerged dias, wearing a black tailcoat and conducting the waves for the audience assembled on the beach in deck chairs.

The photograph, by Eustachy Kossakowski, is owned by the Artists’ Archives of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, who suggest that it may be one of the most reproduced Polish art photographs of all time. They receive dozens of requests each year to reproduce the image on posters, flyers, book covers, etc.

The piece was one of four works performed under the umbrella title Panoramic Sea Happening, an event that took place on August 23rd, 1967 in Łazy, a small Polish town near Osiek. The performance was produced in collaboration Galeria Foksal, during the 5th Koszalin Plein-Air convention. Kantor, wearing a striped bathrobe and fedora, orchestrated the proceedings with a megaphone.

In addition to Sea Concerto, three other works were performed: Erotic Barbuyage, Agrarian Culture on the Sand, and Medusa Raft. For the latter work, Kantor wrote in a text reproduced in the publication:

"The reconstruction of The Raft of the Medusa is to be a faithful and soulless copy of a masterpiece of the Romantic period. We encourage everybody to use any items of the modern tourism industry: rubber mattresses in the brightest of colours, life buoys, bikinis, terry cloth towels, nylon and plastic products, transistors, etc. This of course doesn’t exempt anybody from faithfulness to motions, gestures and inner experiences. We call on everyone for mass participation."

Art critic and curator Joanna Mytkowska wrote "This happening was devised as a total action encompassing huge fragments of a landscape and engaging hundreds of people [...] The attempt to line up the beachgoers according to the composition of Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa was such a mystification."

In addition to many photographs of the event, the booklet also contains written reflections by Tadeusz Kantor, Wieslaw Borowski, and Hanna Ptaszkowska, in both Polish and English. Kantor's intention for the Happening was that the sea was to “impose motion, rhythm and sound values not surpassing the abilities of human perception."