In 1974, The Artistic Program Centre Duniko issued the text “MY BEST VIDEOTAPE IS CURRENT PROGRAMME”. This gesture was a direct response to the neoavant-garde artists’ tendency to produce experimental short films.

The idea of adopting a television programme — the despised “Dziennik Telewizyjny” (Television News) of the Communist era, for instance — as format and content for a work of art, further evolved in the nineties: based on older instructions, programmatically abnormal installations were constructed from scaffoldings, aquariums filled with water and animal entrails, as well as television sets tuned to the contemporaneous programming; additionally, the televised image was altered by mirrors diagonally affixed to the screens.

The Current Program often adopted the formula of an ironic commentary on the reality shaped and disseminated by the mass media (e.g. Bones Collected from Contemporaneous Battlefields, Against a Backdrop of the Current Program — Truth or Lies?, 1994), or an anecdote with a twist (e.g. Hashish, Marijuana, the Artist’s Skin, and a Lash from Einstein’s Eye, Against a Backdrop of the Current Program — Truth or Lies?, 1994).

Written by Krzysztof Siatka