“I Have Always Done – and Still Do – Several Things at Once” An Interview with Leszek Brogowski

Interview by Maksymilian Wroniszewski

The text is taken from the exhibition catalogue Records. Leszek Brogowski and the gn gallery 1978–1981.

The exhibition is devoted to the work of Leszek Brogowski and the history of the legendary Gdańsk gallery gn, which operated from 1978 to 1981 and was a precursor to the Gdańsk Gallery of Photography. It presents Brogowski’s drawings and instant photographs, shown in Poland for the first time, as well as archival materials documenting the gallery’s activities, including works by the artists who helped shape it. An engineer, humanist, artist and, later, philosopher of art, Brogowski was one of the few Polish artists invited to collaborate with the Polaroid Corporation Collection. He treated photography not as a medium for aestheticising the image, but as a democratic tool for analysis, documentation and social communication.

Over the course of four years, the gn gallery presented 50 exhibitions and became one of the important centres of conceptual art in Poland. Alongside artists from the Tri-City area, including Paweł Borkowski, Małgorzata Borowska, Witosław Czerwonka and Witold Węgrzyn, the gallery presented works by Teresa Murak, Zbigniew Dłubak, Wojciech Bruszewski, Jan Berdyszak and Zofia Rydet, among others, as well as international artists including Victor Burgin, Milan Grygar, the controversial ORLAN and the HPA group. The gallery’s activities were brought to an end by the imposition of martial law. In January 1982, Brogowski closed the gallery in protest and emigrated to France, where he developed his academic and artistic practice.

The exhibition explores art as a space for freedom, collaboration and the exchange of ideas. It shows how, under the conditions of late communist Poland, artists built international networks, used the postal system and mail art, and created an alternative cultural circuit.

How did gn gallery – a conceptually oriented photography gallery – come to be established in Gdańsk, a city with no avant-garde tradition?

An important factor was that gn gallery did not operate as a gallery affiliated with the artists’ association, but with the Union of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF), which I joined in 1975. At the time, I regularly read the monthly magazine Fotografia, which published some of the first information on conceptual art. This was thanks to Zbigniew Dłubak, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Urszula Czartoryska, and several other people who co-shaped it. As it happened, Dłubak and I remained friends for many years, even after I moved to France. As I was applying for ZPAF membership, I presented a portfolio that included works already somewhat conceptual in spirit, for example from the Idioms series. Of course, I also had to pay my dues in the form of traditional, applied photography, to show that I had mastered the technique. Once I had been admitted to the Association, it turned out that a gallery was to be established as part of its activities. In situations like this, whoever is willing to get involved does so. There were not many people eager to run the gallery, and it developed within a circle of friends. The group also included Paweł Borkowski, with whom I still go mountain climbing, Witek Węgrzyn, now a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, the journalist Marceli Bacciarelli, who died prematurely, and Wojtek Leszczyński – a young man with whom I later lost touch completely. There was no particular rivalry between us, and since I was the first to join the Association and turned out to be the most active, I naturally became the driving force behind the gallery. That is the genealogy of the project.

Photography was not part of the remit of the State Higher School of Fine Arts at the time. You did not study there.

I studied at Gdańsk University of Technology, where there was an excellent organisation called the Student Chronicle, which brought together photography enthusiasts. I became involved in establishing it. I joined the ZPAF because, at the time, artists’ associations provided a way for people who did not fit into the system of the Polish People’s Republic, with its requirement of regular employment, to work as freelancers. We were given the appropriate stamp on our identity cards, which sometimes came in handy; it gave us greater freedom. That was how visual artists, actors, and photographers lived. However, the first two groups had their own schools and academies, while we did not. As a result, the ZPAF was a motley collection of people from different backgrounds, in its early days especially from amateur photography circles. In the 1970s, there was a dispute between the Gdańsk Photographic Society (GTF) and the ZPAF, even though about a dozen people were active in both organisations. The new generation joining the Association, myself included, was already interested in a completely different conception of photography. The dispute, however, was not about the very idea of amateur photography, which is a really interesting phenomenon, but rather about the fact that, over time, GTF had become a sort of an academy: it began to formalise its structures, but also to ossify, award medals, membership cards, decorations… Anyway, it is worth emphasising that GTF members generally did not belong to the Party. Things were different at the State Higher School of Fine Arts, a private fiefdom of people like Łajming and Jackowski, who were by no means motivated by a disinterested commitment to art. Of course, public art schools are always officially established institutions, but they also have ambitions of their own. Here, there were no ambitions at all. No one wanted anything to change in the Gdańsk art scene. On the contrary, the point was to ensure that nothing changed, while a select few could travel to Germany and sell their paintings in third-rate galleries. Everyone else was expected to submit to these private interests. Of course, there were also people at the school who were likeable and had the right orientation…

Witosław Czerwonka, Adam Haras, and Jerzy Ostrogórski – the founders of the Out Gallery, which also had a conceptual orientation. I take it these are the people you mean.

At one point, we were all close friends. But a handful of people, were not able to change the profile of the entire school. Apart from them, other people from the State Higher School of Fine Arts also came to openings at gn gallery. Together, they formed a small circle, although quite a few people from the city came to exhibition openings. I must admit that our conversation is a surprise to me, because I never thought that, years later, anyone would return to the history of gn gallery. When we were setting it up, we didn’t think about it from a historical perspective. Of course, we hoped that our work would be noticed, but frankly, we were carefree young people who wanted to try something new. There was no professional strategy behind it, no desire to make a career, and that was what set us apart from the visual arts circles. They were in a more secure position, as they often did work for state-owned companies and could earn quite good money from these “side jobs”. Photographers, on the other hand, worked whenever a need arose. We would work as news photographers at the shipyard or take documentary photographs of the city and then we were free for a while. In a way, this brought a certain sense of comfort, because it gave us a perspective that is lost once you focus on economic and professional concerns.

Out Gallery operated in yet another context, as it was part of the Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions (BWA) in Sopot and therefore an official institution. So anyone who came to the BWA, whether on their own or as part of a group tour, would stop by the gallery. We, on the other hand, operated somewhat on the margins, which actually suited me. That probably would not have been possible within the BWA.

gn gallery was opened in 1978 and closed when martial law was imposed. The exhibitions presented there were mostly associated with conceptual art. How did you define conceptualism at the time?

I think the commonly held view that conceptualism is an end in itself is overstated, although I don’t know if I was aware of that when I was setting up the gallery. I acted without much social engagement, although I could have taken that path, and I rather regret that I didn’t. After all, there were quite a few people in the conceptual art circle who were engaged with political and social, ideological, or philosophical issues. When you are young, you do not yet have the comprehensive perspective or the intellectual tools to take all of that on. Years later, I can say that we did really interesting things, but very naive ones too. We just wanted to create something interesting – that, generally, was what motivated us. Another thing is that I have always done – and still do – several things at once, and the conditions were not always favourable. As a result, I feel that I have never done anything really well in my life. Most of the time, I didn’t have enough time to achieve anything that would give me a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction. That is basically still the case today, though perhaps I still have a few years to change that.

Despite the deliberate avoidance of social issues, the voice of the street still made itself heard in the gallery. And loudly so – in the tone of a strike.

That’s true. In 1981, we put on an exhibition of photographs from the so-called “events”, that is, the strikes of 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, and 1980. It was the first time photographs of this kind had been shown publicly. We ran a photography gallery, so it was one of the few places where such an exhibition could take place at all I’m glad we showed it. Andrzej Wajda was among those who saw it at the time. The exhibition then travelled to Warsaw. Stefan Figlarowicz sent me a photograph of the long queue of people waiting to see it. In the end, after martial law was imposed, the photographs were confiscated and later shown at Ministry of Internal Affairs premises – for training purposes, of course. That was the only time the gallery really resonated with what was happening in the streets.

I once came across documentation of your action Seaside Happening. The photographs showed a group of people on the seashore, assuming various configurations in relation to a cubic frame. I had never associated your work with happenings before, and the reference to Kantor is interesting as well. What exactly did the action involve?

Oh, that’s a completely different story! I was never particularly attached to the forms of happening or performance, but that didn’t stop me, for example, from repainting a painting in public. It was never at the core of my practice, though. The photographs you are referring to are a work by Ivan Kafka, a Czech artist with whom I was very close friends at the time. Together, we founded a two-person group called Modesty International, which, as we thought, brought together only the most modest artists. Czechoslovaks did not have the same political freedom that we did, so Ivan would come to Poland not with works of art, but with bundles tucked under his arm. He would then make his works from them, here. One of them was that cube, which arrived in the form of aluminium tubes. In such cases, we would tell the Office for the Control of the Press, Publications and Performances – the censorship authority – that we were exhibiting an artist from New Zealand. Then they would leave us alone. That cube, if I remember correctly, symbolised both confinement and openness: the situation of an artist confined by the authorities within a rigid framework, yet able to step outside it without difficulty.

When I looked through the catalogues of exhibitions at gn gallery, I was struck not only by the way the texts they contained resonated with what was happening in Western art and philosophy, but also by their anticipation of certain connections and attitudes that had yet to emerge in Poland. The catalogues contain, for example, references to the early Foucault, who would only really gain recognition in Poland after 1989. And few people know that before Orlan came to Gdańsk in 1996, when body art was enjoying a surge in popularity, she had already been here once before – for a show at gn gallery in 1981.

Orlan titled the action Gallery MesuRAGE. The action consisted of her measuring the height, length and width of the gallery using her own body as a unit of measurement. Some pieces of cardboard were left behind. The gallery measuring was quite interesting, but it had no impact whatsoever. Orlan left Warsaw on the last flight before martial law was imposed, which also led to the gallery being closed. At the time, I was taking part in the Congress of Polish Culture in Warsaw, and quite by chance, my address on the second day of the congress turned out to be the final speech of the entire event. The proposals I put forward at the time for breaking the state monopoly give me pause today, because they were quite revolutionary, and I don’t remember having any particular inclination towards revolutionary ideas at the time… As for Orlan, we were friends for a while later on, when I was already living in France. She is somewhat eccentric, but in the best sense of the word. Nevertheless, I found her way of working somewhat disturbing. I felt that what she was doing was at odds with the emancipatory function of art. Taking upon oneself the kind of opprobrium that show-business stars essentially cultivate somehow failed to convince me, although of course I acknowledge her commitment, achievements and so on.

There is a well-known story in Gdańsk about how, just before martial law, intermedia education came very close to being introduced at the National Higher School of Fine Arts. You were one of the people involved in developing the new curriculum. How did a graduate of Gdańsk University of Technology end up at an art school?

My story with the Higher School of Fine Arts began in 1978 and lasted until 1981, when I was kicked out. I taught a course in Visual Structures and lectures on art history. I was given that responsibility by Piotr Bogdanowicz, who was then head of the teacher training department. After graduating from Gdańsk University of Technology in 1979, I was summoned to see a woman who represented the Ministry of Labour at the university. She told me that, since I had graduated, I was required to take up employment. I told her I was already working. She said that, if so, I was doing it illegally. I replied that, instead of looking for a job for me, perhaps she could simply assign me to the place where I was already working. It turned out that the employer had to issue some necessary paperwork, so, all in all, Jackiewicz, who was rector at the time, wrote to the ministry to arrange my employment, and then found that he could not dismiss me because, under the regulations, I was required to work there for three years. Perhaps the fact that Czerwonka, Haras, Usarewicz and I had begun discussing the idea of this studio became the flashpoint that prompted the school authorities to dismiss me. I was given notice, which I accepted, but the students refused to accept it. They went to the Voivodeship Office, and as a result Jackiewicz had to put up with me for a while longer. In the end, I stopped working at the Higher School of Fine Arts in September 1981, a few months before martial law was imposed.

So you had interests in the humanities, technology and art – an unusual combination. I suspect that you pursued many of these interests through self-education.

My father was an engineer and my mother was a painter. She wasn’t an intellectual, but she had a wise approach to life, and I owe her a great deal. I must have been about nine when I made a little stitched booklet containing Picasso-like drawings, probably inspired by reproductions in Przekrój, as well as various critical and ironic jokes I had made up about my parents, school and so on. I thought the booklet had been lost, but fortunately I happened to find it again. That was undoubtedly my mother’s influence. My technical bent, on the other hand, came from my father and my brother, who was also an engineer. That is how I see the early days of my interests in art and technology. As for philosophy, well – there was simply a library at home, and I had a knack for reading. I must still have been at secondary school when I saw Hegel’s three-volume Aesthetics in a bookshop and bought it with the – very naive – idea that it might inspire me to reflect on photography. At the time, photography and philosophy were so closely connected for me that, if not for photography, I might never have become interested in philosophy at all.

I should point out, however, that my development was by no means entirely self-directed. In the 1970s, both in Poland and elsewhere, artists would meet at so-called plein-air workshops and symposia. This was how the artistic community organised itself. At that time, the state had money for community activities, so we’d always find money for plein-air workshops. We were provided with room and board. The evenings, of course, could end in all sorts of ways, but the next day, from early afternoon onwards, everyone would gather to discuss things. Some would prepare talks, while others would put on an exhibition – even if it was in the middle of a forest. This was a sort of university that had a formative impact on me. Apart from bedtime reading, you need to have some people with some knowledge and know someone. It would have been hard to shape oneself. We had plain-air workshops in Miastko and Zielona Góra. Sometimes they became occasions for confrontation, at times quite brutal. I remember Warpechowski tearing into me once – he didn’t have a good word to say about me. And, incidentally, he was probably right – even though he was completely drunk – because I was just a twenty-year-old upstart with no experience at the time. But there were others too – artists, critics and theorists such as Andrzej Kostołowski, Bożena Kowalska and Marceli Bacciarelli – who drew me into various things, sometimes, for example, quoting me somewhere. After martial law, plein-air gatherings, like conceptual art as a whole, declined in importance. Over time, art schools came to be dominated by commercially oriented approaches.

In between, there were also the so-called church exhibitions. You took part in those organised by Janusz Bogucki.

After martial law, symposia and plein-air gatherings were no longer organised. Instead, the Church became a space that accommodated almost anything. What was shown there didn’t always correspond to the atmosphere of the sacred. I remember, for example, a performance by Warpechowski in which he lay on the church floor covered with a quilt, while Natalia LL whipped him through it. The audience, watching from some distance away, could not see that a square had been cut out of the quilt, so it was only when Warpechowski stood up that they saw the red mark on his back. But what does this have to do with the scourging of Christ or with Catholic spirituality? I don’t think it has anything to do with either, because what is at stake lies elsewhere, and so does the meaning.

I’d say Bogucki and I were quite fond of each other. I don’t know which of us was fonder of the other. I remember reading his book Rozmowy o sztuce z 1954 roku (Conversations on Art from 1954), which interested me for obvious reasons. We had met before martial law, and in the book Sztuka i filozofia (Art and Philosophy), published by gn gallery, we even included a short text of his. As it happened, on one occasion I brought about a meeting between him and Nina Smolarz, Figlarowicz’s second wife. As you know, Bogucki and Smolarz later organised a number of important exhibitions. Whenever I went to Warsaw, I would always drop in to see him for a chat. I think Bogucki was somewhat disappointed by the works he saw at my place. In one exhibition, I showed drawings in which the lines were arranged in such a way as to form a cross. But it had nothing to do with Christianity, as Bogucki probably imagined it did. To be fair, he invited artists as they were, baggage and all; how he interpreted their work was another matter. His Catholic manner somewhat irritated me, but he was certainly no fanatic. Later, my French education made me anticlerical in the revolutionary tradition, and today I probably wouldn’t enter that kind of collaboration with Catholics, but at the time the context mattered. It was rather like what happened with the democratic opposition: while the struggle was still under way, we formed a kind of strategic alliance, but once everyone started saying what they really thought, all those alliances fell apart. So at some point – I no longer remember whether it was because I left Poland or because the atmosphere around the Church ultimately became too oppressive – we lost touch as well.

In the 1980s, you had some involvement with church-sponsored exhibitions, and in the 1990s with another phenomenon that was important for the decade as a whole—Ryszard Ziarkiewicz’s Magazyn Sztuki, where you occasionally published texts. What was that collaboration like, and what was your attitude towards so-called critical art, for which the magazine became an important platform? It is, after all, the very opposite of conceptualism.

It is, after all, the very opposite of conceptualism. If I remember correctly, I published only a few texts in Magazyn Sztuki, including pieces on Dłubak, Tadeusz Mysłowski, Orlan and Louise Bourgeois. I had no ideological affiliation with the magazine, just as I had none with the Church. Once again, I have to refer to the context. After the political changes in Poland, a great deal was happening in art, and there was considerable demand for writing about it and other subjects as well. At the time, I even published several texts in Twórczość and Teksty Drugie. For me, that was quite an honour! For me, that was quite an honour! In 1989, although I was already living abroad, I was still part of the Polish art scene, and from 1990 onwards I began contributing regularly to Obieg, published by Ujazdowski Castle. For several years, I sent in a Paris chronicle for every issue. Then came Andrzej Saj’s Format and Andrzej P. Bator’s Dyskurs, both published by the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. From 1996 onwards, I published quite extensively in both of them, and I also brought French authors to Dyskurs. A few years ago, Łukasz Guzek entrusted me with running the Andrzej Pierzgalski Gallery in Art and Documentation, now published by the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, where we publish artists’ documents. In fact, I begun contributing to the journal in 2009. The printed press has played an important part in my life. In France, I founded two magazines, both available online free of charge. In 2000, I founded Sans niveau ni mètre Journal du Cabinet du livre d’artiste. The phrase sans niveau ni mètre is an allusion to the anarchist slogan Ni Dieu ni maître. The journal accompanied the activities of the Cabinet du livre d’artiste, which I founded in Rennes. Sixty issues of the journal have been published, and everything suggests that it will continue to appear. In 2019, when I was Vice-President for Research at Rennes 2 University, I founded the journal Palimpseste. Sciences, humanités, sociétés. A few months ago, following the university elections, I handed over the reins to the new team, and the tenth issue of the journal is on its way.

When did you move to France?

I moved to France in 1985, and in 1995 I completed a PhD on the theory of knowledge and the humanities. It completely changed my life, which essentially falls into two periods: before and after my PhD. At the time, Polish philosophy, apart from Marxism, was dominated by Neo-Thomism, which I kept my distance from, although choosing France, where Marxist philosophy was still very much alive, might not have seemed the best choice either. I grew up in a home where Marx’s name was always mentioned ironically. My studies in philosophy were, in part, a struggle with myself, against myself, to integrate these different intellectual orientations and make them part of who I was.

And what about post-structuralism? Did French Theory appeal to you intellectually?

French Theory is France seen through American eyes. We don’t use that term in France, and no, it wasn’t particularly important to me. I was more interested in looking for the roots than in keeping up with current developments. I viewed French Theory through the eyes of Vincent Descombes, author of  Modern French Philosophy. Later, from 1995 onwards, it was in this spirit that I founded and edited the series Minerwa. Biblioteka filozofii i historii filozofii (Minerva: Library of Philosophy and the History of Philosophy) for the publishing house słowo/obraz terytoria. I wanted to show where French Theory came from, the sources and traditions from which it emerged.

My idea when studying in France was to fill in what my education at Gdańsk University of Technology had been unable to provide: a grounding in the humanities and philosophy. I studied at Université Paris IV Panthéon-Sorbonne, where several professors were on the far right, but where Anne Mœglin-Delcroix also taught, among others. She played a decisive role in defining what artists’ publications – cheapartists’ books – actually are. After one of her lectures, she asked me what I was actually doing at that university and suggested that I should be studying at Paris VIII in Saint-Denis, where Deleuze taught. I, however, was rather reserved about French Theory. That is still the case today, even though various theories developed within that tradition are part of my intellectual baggage. I was more interested in Deleuze as a historian of philosophy than as a thinker – an interesting one, perhaps, but too often imprecise. He moves from metaphor to metaphor, and as a result many things escape him, remaining implicit, as a kind of subtext for those who already believe. So, of Deleuze’s works, we translated his book on Kant. I myself worked my way through classical German philosophy, including Dilthey, whom I studied quite extensively.

You were one of the co-founders of the publishing house słowo/obraz terytoria. Could you tell me about its early days?

Stanisław Rosiek and Janusz Górski founded the publishing house słowo/obraz, and later the idea came up that we might do something together, but Górski wasn’t interested. So, together with Staszek’s sister, Maria Smoleń, we founded the publishing house słowo/obraz terytoria. Of course, Staszek would be the better person to ask about the history of the publishing house. We have remained steadfast friends, and I was only in Gdańsk for perhaps three months of the year. That was one thing. Another was that, at the time, we were thinking less about specific series, subjects and books than about the position of the publishing house in the market during the transition period. Our efforts were something of an all-hands-on-deck operation. There were three of us, and basically each of us did a bit of everything, depending on what needed to be done. It was only later that our roles became more specialised. My contribution was translations and contacts with publishers in France. Rosiek had contacts in Poland, and that was how it worked. We started out with no money at all and constantly had to apply for grants, which allowed us to cover the printing costs of books we had already published. We never had the capital that would have allowed us to invest in anything or work with greater financial security. We were constantly operating under a kind of financial and editorial pressure.

I remember that in our conversations we often mentioned the fact that, after 1989, around three thousand publishing houses were established in Poland, most of which published only one or two books. At first, we wanted our publishing house to be a proper publishing house – one that would publish some translations but also promote its own authors. We decided, however, that we would not publish fiction, because otherwise we would be overwhelmed. Rosiek was too closely connected with literary circles, so we had to draw that line from the outset. To be fair, though, the boundary was never entirely watertight, as we did, and still do, occasionally publish purely literary works. The core of our publishing programme, however, is the humanities, philosophy, art history, literary history, and work in the social, anthropological and political fields. Interestingly, Mateusz Kwaterko once accused us of publishing mainly right-wing authors, whereas I was interested in publishing left-wing and revolutionary works. In fact, our publishing house was by no means closed to them, and our choices were by no means right-wing. We published around a thousand titles, a bit of everything—a little poetry, some German authors, some political science, some American authors, some French Theory, some Russian semiotics, some Czech cinema, and so on.

Kwaterko, incidentally, later criticised the translation of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle published by słowo/obraz terytoria. And since we’re talking about French, revolutionary thought in the humanities, I’m reminded of something Rosiek once said: that the publishing house largely published the kinds of works to which Maria Janion’s Transgresje (Transgressions) had pointed the way. For Janion, French thought was probably the most important of all. Did you take part in Maria Janion’s seminars?

The Society of the Spectacle was something of a misfire: the translation wasn’t ready for publication, but it was published in that form anyway. I don’t know how that happened, and I broadly agree with Kwaterko’s criticism. In the 1980s, I was in contact with Rosiek, but not with Janion herself. I never attended any of her seminars, but friendships, as we know, are conducive to the exchange of information and knowledge. So the seminars were not a source for me, but rather a kind of horizon of knowledge. From my perspective, we did not focus on the authors featured in Transgresje. I remember that we happened to come along at a time when French publishers were organising themselves and looking to expand into Poland. They imagined Poland was a desert and that they would be able to sell us everything, only to discover that virtually everything was already available here. This was thanks to the many publishers, each with their own authors and their own areas of interest. French authors had been published in this way both under communism and long before that, even during the times of the Partitions. So we were aware that we were entering a field with a rich tradition, one that we wanted to continue. Then it was time to move on to other subjects.

słowo/obraz terytoria is one of the many manifestations of your publishing activity. gn gallery alone left behind several dozen catalogues. For art historians, they are an extraordinarily important resource.

We tried to make sure that every exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue. They were simple leaflets produced using very basic techniques, but I’m glad we made them. I had always been interested in publishing books, and at one point I even decided to focus on it. In 2000, I founded Éditions Incertain Sens in France, which publishes artists’ books. They look more like ordinary books than works of art: they are not artistic or handcrafted objects, made by hand as unique pieces, but industrially or semi-industrially produced objects. To date, we have published more than seventy artists’ books. In the Collection Grise series, which so far comprises seven volumes, we publish research on books published by artists. Most recently, we published two volumes that we had been working on for almost ten years, containing interviews with the first generation of publishers of artists’ books. They include Yvon Lambert and Michel Durand-Dessert, as well as the Italians Maurizio Spatola and Maurizio Nannucci, and several British publishers. The impetus for these books came from the fact that the people we wanted to talk to were beginning to pass away. Some of them died shortly after we interviewed them. In these conversations, the question often came up of what constitutes a real book – how large should its print run be? A hundred, two hundred, three hundred copies? herman de vries, a Dutch-born artist living in Germany whose publications have print runs of no more than fifty copies, replied that what matters is not only the size of the edition, but also the value of the ideas being promoted. If the print run is small but the ideas are important, they will still have an impact. A gallery does not need a large audience either – after all, here we are talking about gn gallery forty years later.