Arystokraci wszystkich krajów – łączcie się! Szkic do antropologicznej opowieści o Łodzi Kaliskiej

In the cultural landscape of Łódź, the already thirty-years old avant-garde Łódź Kaliska group remains an exceptional phenomenon transcending the framework of critical refection on art. The group’s paradigm was always contestation aimed against trends nobilitated in art, ideologies, cultural norms and fashions, habits of social thought, conformistic behaviour in life and art, or the social compulsion of productivity; in doing so, the group used assorted forms of laughter, an approach that was extremely difficult considering that the first years of the activity of Łódź Kaliska coincided with the martial law period. The text discusses the first decade, accepting as an interpretation strategy the cultural categories of the carnival and carnivalisation, present in the reflections of M. Bakhtin and those of his later exegetes and polemicists. Although Łódź Kaliska described itself as apolitical, reality rendered this feature impossible. In a society that during the marital law years recalled Romantic myths, biographies, symbols and gestures, the carnivalisation of life and art was a hazardous undertaking. Already in the early 1980s Łódź Kaliska proposed new forms of participation in public life – neither heroic nor conformist – that called for the courage to “be funny”.