Temporary Exhibition: "Hold My Beer and Watch This" by Arkadiusz Piętak

Until October 13th 2019, in the courtyard of The National Museum in Szczecin - The Museum of Regional Traditions, an exhibition by Arkadiusz Piętak entitled "Hold My Beer and Watch This" may be seen.

The exhibition was the main part of Artkadiusz Piętak's doctorate with the same title. At The National Museum in Szczecin, the artist presents an interesting project related to music. The works on display are saturated with the author's specific sense of humor and a large dose of irony, derived directly from his favorite artistic directions, such as Dadaism or the Fluxus movement.

 

Arkadiusz Piętak is a versatile man and artist, willing to explore the world, especially when it comes to its material and technical manifestation. If one may be called "one man band", this is him, and often in the literal sense. He is a bass player in a well-known Szczecin band, he has made many musical instruments, from electric and bass guitars, through guitar-cello hybrids, some strange instruments with names that I dare not quote here for censorship reasons, to works shown at the "Hold My Beer and Watch This" exhibition at The National Museum in Szczecin. They include an instrument, or rather an installation, for playing aleatoric music and an enlarged copy of the piano key. Piętak's "orchestral" interests are not limited to music and instruments. His constantly expanding interests include competition sailing, reconstruction of a seagoing yacht (with all derivatives, e.g. engine repairs, drive parts, equipment of all kinds, etc.), documentary photography, world cuisine and, last but not least, art. Manual skills allow the artist to manage production and implement technically complex solutions, which was reflected in his exhibition.

The laboriousness of the process of implementation of works was influenced by extreme diligence, even piety, for example in the selection of the types of wood used for the construction of hammer mechanisms in keyboards, properly dry and of proper quality, although it was only about the model of the mechanism. It was a similar way with the aleatoric instrument. Therefore, the selection of components of the installation, their character or content, both conceptual and visual, should give lovers of contemporary art a lot of pleasure.


Dr. Łukasz Skąpski, Associate Professor

 

"Hold My Beer and Watch This" is the most conservative exhibition on display in Szczecin this autumn. The National Museum in Szczecin is not a good place for artistic excesses and experiments. Therefore Arkadiusz Piętak reches for noble patterns of first Dadaists with special solemnity. This aims at giving the Museum's attentive audience a closer look at realisations perfectly fitting into the current academic canon, which is the nearby Academy of Art students' everyday life.
The torch of education burns with bright and strong fire in the hands of the artist, showing how much has changed since Duchamp's, Man Ray's or Cage's classic actions. 
– There was no Dadaism i Poland? – Hold my beer and watch this.


Dr. Mikołaj Iwański
The Head of The Department of Art History and Theory
Painting and New Media Faculty
Academy of Art in Szczecin


 

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