Cat-astrophe, or: A Point that Leads Nowhere
Kot-astrofa czyli punkt bez dalszego ciągu

Summary/Abstract: A text devoted to Jerzy Grzegorzewski’s The Slow Darkening of Paintings (Studio Theater, 1985), based on Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Niziołek considers the language of the performance, claiming that the deformation of words, mimicking their onetime significance, creates an unsolvable rebus. Niziołek ponders the presence of “deformed, disappearing, yet ever perceptible traces of historical catastrophe” inscribed in Lowry’s novel. He discards the possibility of considering Grzogorzewski’s theater in categories of the sublime or calling his plays a mere game with the viewer’s memory. To his mind, in The Slow Darkening of Paintings Grzegorzewski “sought less to activate, than to eliminate the ability to draw associations, to cull from the stores of the memory […],” and “instead of mourning, he celebrated […] a melancholy sense of a catastrophe that has already happened.”

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