One Week at Demarco Gallery

In conceptual art, ideas were much more important than material forms of expression, and art was often seen as a space for social communication. Visual work itself also underwent a redefinition in which text became a part and sometimes a form in itself. Descriptions, instructions or author's comments were therefore an element that accompanied ephemeral conceptual works. These various written materials were intended to acquaint the viewer with the artist's intentions, the course and purpose of the actions undertaken. Maria Michałowska's One Week at the Demarco Gallery project was also accompanied by a final commentary by the artist, describing in detail the place and time of the event, its script and the guidelines for the final exhibition, which in the end consisted of seven posters, one for each day of the week in August 1972, and 28 photographs documenting the course of the event. In describing the Edinburgh event, the artist highlighted another important context for its realisation. One Week at the Demarco Gallery, which took place in Edinburgh, was a reference to a similar project, One Week - Osieki 70, which had taken place two years earlier in Poland during the Meeting of Artists, Scientists and Art Theorists in Osieki. From the 1960s to the early 1980s, the meetings commonly referred to as the Osiek plein-air workshops were the most important artistic events in Poland organised in the open air. They were framed by an ambitious theoretical programme, dominated by new ideas and the conceptual and neo-avant-garde language of art. Richard Demarco's programme in Edinburgh was similarly progressive. Michałowska's campaign, which conceptually linked two geographically distant places on either side of the Iron Curtain, thus took on an additional, political aspect. Magdalena Lewoc