One Week at Demarco Gallery

The distinctive feature of Conceptual Art was the superiority of the concept over its material mode of expression, as reflected in the interchangeable names of the movement, such as Conceptual Art, Dematerialised Art or Post-Object Art. Conceptual art activities, often involving performances, happenings and stagings, were inherently ephemeral. The situation was similar in the case of Maria Michałowska's One Week at Demarco Gallery, an event organised as part of the Edinburgh International Art Festival (1972). Many artists, in the process of designing the course of the performance with the participation of the public, immediately envisaged the need for its documentation. Sometimes it became an integral part of the work; often, after the event, it was its only material trace. In the early 1970s, artists were most likely to use photographic documentation. In the case of Michałowska's work, photo-documentation was central to the course of the artistic endeavour - it was a form of dialogue with the participants of the artist's Edinburgh event, the aim of which was to create a chronicle of a week (20-26 August 1972) at the Richard Demarco Gallery (1966-1992). The methods used to create the chronicle were a daily photographic record, made according to a precise script devised by the artist, and the comments made by the spectators who visited the gallery. Four photographs were taken each day: the first documented the unveiling of the daily calendar card, the second the moment when the time of the beginning of the event was written on the card, the other two were freely chosen shots of events in or around the gallery. These photos were placed next to the previous day's sheet the following day. The complete photographic documentation of the event comprises 28 photos, which were then grouped into seven sets for each day and placed on the featured board, summarising the week's progress. Magdalena Lewoc