ABSTRACT
The first is Krzysztof Plesniarowicz, who was the first director of the Cricoteka after Kantor’s death in 1990. His book The Dead Memory Machine was first published in an English translation in 1994, and is an invaluable source of descriptions of performances, translations of letters and essays, interviews, and commentaries. Plesniarowicz allows us to enter Kantor’s Polish world in a way that, to date, no other scholar has attempted. There is as yet no full biography of Kantor, so that Plesniarowicz becomes our essential guide to the artist’s mind. Supplementing this is Michal Kobialka’s book A Journey through Other Spaces, published in America in 1993. Kobialka is a professor at the University of Minnesota and the foremost Kantor scholar outside Poland. His book is a valuable source of translations of many of Kantor’s most important manifestos as well as an important description of Kantor’s last work, Today is My Birthday. Together Plesniarowicz and Kobialka have made possible this introductory book to Kantor. The Cricoteka archive also houses books and articles in French by Guy Scarpetta and Denis Bablet, plus some material in Italian, all of which may give different insights into Kantor’s processes. Here we can provide only some clues from talking to both his company members and to those who have followed on. As Kantor himself wrote of the Cricoteka: ‘Only an individual place of this kind rather than a museum can express the full truth about the artist’s oeuvre’ (Halczak c.1990: 219)
The irony is that a major museum dedicated to the work of Tadeusz Kantor is under construction near the River Vistula as I write.
