The COVID-19 crisis is generating far-reaching outcomes for culture

An interview with Jakub Kornhauser, a Kraków-based poet, literary critic and researcher of avant-garde. Interviewer: Grzegorz Nurek

GRZEGORZ NUREK: You are one of the co-founders of the Centre for Avant-Garde Studies at the Jagiellonian University’s Department of Polish Studies. The work of the centre concentrates on avant-garde research, but is it limited to literature?

JAKUB KORNHAUSER: We established our centre a few years ago convinced that there is a need to get the story of avant-garde out of schoolbook charts and definitions. We are all victims of different clichés which are sold to us by school materials, which tend to repeat the same names and works and which are further spiced up by some remote anecdotes, as if avant-garde was a Sumerian phenomenon. Avant-garde is not only a shared name for numerous artistic searches which took place 100 years ago, but also a state of mind, an experimental potential, which can get activated regardless of the historical context.