Giving Back the Gift: Predicaments of Patronage and an Offering from Włodzimierz Borowski

At a 1966 Symposium hosted by a nitrogen plant in socialist Poland, artist Włodzimierz Borowski staged a performance. He declared the plant's urea furnaces to be works of art and returned them to plant management. With this “gift,” he reversed the Symposium's patronage model, which had put the plant's resources at his disposal: he gave back the gift of patronage. This article uses the device of returning the gift of state support to explore ambivalent engagements with the official art system. This formula is applied to two later actions giving back (or away) resources granted to artists by public patrons. The discussed artists—Borowski, Zofia Kulik and Łukasz Surowiec—use this device to contend with their complicity as beneficiaries of compromised funding arrangements. However, the article assesses their counter-gifts not as dissident acts against repressive regimes but as constructive efforts to arbitrate with authorities and gain purchase as working artists.