The White Prince

Exhibition Culture:

During the 70’s decade we moved fast and saw the winds of change coming from America and Russia. In one trip to Warsaw the 24 hour journey from Berlin was full of tension, a kind of foreboding, but just a glimpse of danger amidst the fiction and the contextual art of Jan Swidzinski.

From the oil world of Russia and Saudi Arabia content became the action and truth of our events in the Lower East Side of New York. The Canadians in the Lower East Side were bringing home a natural feeling compared to the trumped up American nouveau. This nouveau of the Americans was falling along with the Cold War and thirty years later America seemed like a pariah all over the world. However, once you left New York and took a Greyhound to the West Coast the picture changes. Reality or context, once you leave Toronto or New York, is a non mirror action as if the country outside is a reality few would grasp. Now with the war machine operating from Russia to the Middle East it is almost misery and pornographic to watch the television unfold. As interference and demonstration appear in anti-war industry the new cold war is once again centre stage for the elections in America. Self-destruction is de rigeur as if the New York bars and clubs were still alive thirty years later.

- Ron Giii 2004

(Jan Swidzinski is a Polish writer who introduced contextual art to Canada in the form of a manifesto printed and distributed in 1975. He was invited to Toronto in 1976 to the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication, CEAC, of which Giii was a member.)