ANNA BAUMGART (in collaboration with AGNIESZKA KURANT)

Chinese Whispers at lokal_30_warszawa_london

If Spirit goes West…

by Aaron Schuster

A well known passage from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History describes the angel in Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus,” which was a gift from the painter to the writer and critic. Benjamin imagines this ‘new angel’ gazing upon the ruins of the history even as he is propelled relentlessly into the future.

“Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The angel would like to heal the disaster, to make the smashed things whole, but he is constantly being thrown ahead by a giant storm, “blowing in from Paradise.” He can only survey the damage that passes too fast for him to repair. It is this double movement,
a melancholy backwards gaze onto the nightmare that is history coupled with an irresistible flight into the future, that Benjamin ironically names “progress.”

How might things look to the angel today, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism, neoliberal triumphalism and its host of supposedly contingent ‘embarrassments’ (endless wars, financial collapse, ecological devastation…), in short: what does the angel of history see at the end of history? The pile of wreckage continues to accumulate at his feet, but how lovely this heap of broken images now appears: there shoots the head of Lenin on a chiseled shot glass, here a beautiful Lissitzky motif makes for an attractive wallpaper design, and in the nightshop next to a three star hotel, neatly stacked on the shelf, is rubble from that famous Wall on sale as souvenirs. The past catastrophe has been miraculously sublated as glittering appearances. Symbolic reminders of revolution are remade as radical decoration, agit prop turned into pop. This recycling is part of the cunning of capitalism, and one wonders whether the angel is more distressed or distracted by these spectacular surfaces that effortlessly glide over jagged ruins.

This brings us to a second question: in which direction is this backwards flying angel traveling? East or West? As we know from Hegel, universal history moves in a straight line from East to West, i.e. from Oriental despotism to Western liberalism, with Europe as its absolute end—although in the last decades many would identify the United States of America as that spiritual endpoint, and Hegel himself speculated that “America is… the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself.” In post-history, however, Spirit moves ‘regressively’ from West to East: it returns to its origins in order to bring the once surpassed lands into the fold of modernity, yet not without the kind of accidents, antagonisms, and strange reversals that make up the stuff of history. Indeed, post-history might be nothing more than this fateful shift in Spirit’s historical trajectory. What better representative of the Weltgeist has there been in recent decades than Jeffrey Sachs and his band of Harvard economists traveling to Russia to transform the defunct command economy into a shining example of the free market? Their shock therapy (a highly advanced and efficient version of Marx’s “primitive accumulation”) helped engender the new form of twenty-first century authoritarian capitalism.

The return of Spirit from West to East has also had a dramatic aesthetic impact. A few years ago the angel stopped by an exhibition opening in Kiev, where he could look at drawings by Paco Rabanne and snack on sushi with smoked salmon and an endless supply of imported Raffaello candies. At the afterparty, there were whispers about a new deal for raw resources with Chinese mining giants; the oligarchs were talking jealously about the good deals they had cut in Africa. The Chinese, it was generally agreed, are managing things well.

Chinese Whispers (the title of the wallpaper piece and the exhibition co-authored by Anna Baumgart and Agnieszka Kurant), wonderfully called in Polish głuchy telefon, a wordplay combining “deaf telephone” and “dead telephone,” is a children’s game that teaches a profound lesson about the nature of communication. Even seemingly simple acts of listening and repeating involve active interpretation; all communication effectively entails a process of distortion. One begins by whispering “Marx” and by the end of the chain it somehow comes out “Coca-Cola.” In Masculin, Feminin one of the intertitles between the film’s chapters reads “This film could be called The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” But the movie most relevant to our purposes is the following year’s La Chinoise, which radicalizes the theme. There, in 1967, Godard draws on Dostoevsky’s The Possessed in order to tell
a prophetic tale about youth and revolution, uncannily foreshadowing the events of May ’68. Just as in Dostoevsky, so here violence in the service of the revolution goes wrong. Godard’s main focus, however, is on the transfer between Marxist ideology and commodified cool (it’s La Chinoise’s treatment of this political subject that marks a break with Godard’s earlier new wave films), a problem which the film exposes without resolving. The very consumerist society that the young revolutionaries wish to transform thoroughly penetrates their attitudes toward their own revolutionary praxis. Objects like Mao’s Little Red Book become fetishized and treated as stylish fare, piled in towering anti-capitalist heaps; while reading Maoist scripture one of the characters dons a series of joke sunglasses, with the national flags of the USA, USSR, China, France, and Britain filling the frames; a satirical pop song, “Mao-Mao,” provides an exciting theme for the agitated youth.

There would seem to be an unbridgeable disjunction between what Benjamin spoke of as the unrealized possibilities buried among the ruins of history, the “weak messianic power” of lost causes, and their destination as mere appearances, design emptied of political content. For fans of contradiction and overdetermination, this disjunction was brought to its self-reflective maximum in the line “Révolution n’est pas un diner” (“Revolution is not a party” or “Revolution is not a gala dinner”) sung in festive pop tones by Claude Channes.

Vietnam burns and me I spurn Mao Mao

Johnson giggles and me I wiggle Mao Mao

Napalm runs and me I gun Mao Mao

Cities die and me I cry Mao Mao

Whores cry and me I sigh Mao Mao

The rice is mad and me a cad

It’s the Little Red Book

That makes it all move

Imperialism lays down the law

Revolution is not a party

The A-bomb is a paper tiger

The masses are the real heroes

The Yanks kill and me I read Mao Mao

The jester is king and me I sing Mao Mao

The bombs go off and me I scoff Mao Mao

Girls run and me I follow Mao Mao

The Russians eat and me I dance Mao Mao

I denounce and I renounce Mao Mao

It’s the Little Red Book

That makes it all move

Aaron Schuster – American writer and philosopher living in Brussels. He lectures and publishes extensively on psychoanalysis and contemporary philosophy and art. He writes for art magazines such “Frieze”, “Cabinet”, “Frog” and “Metropolis M.”. Co-author of libretto for Cellar Door: An Opera in Almost One Act (JRP Ringier, 2008). In 2010 his book The Cosmonaut of The Erotic Future: A Brief History of Levitation from St Joseph to Yuri Gargarin will be published.

IDENTIFYING IDENTITY (A Troubling Reality)

The composite nature of a modern Western identity poses a state of confusion, and at the same time there remains a residual sense of a delusional belief in self-made identity. The fragmented confection that we call ‘our personal’ identity, is greatly dependent upon the myriad of contextual circumstances that act as an interface to the accumulative aspects of the varied lives we live. Whether these contextual phenomena are experienced as mere objects, people or things, they are the Other (and ‘other’), and form the complex background met in a groundswell of discursive attitudes and circumstances (the mirrored interior or exterior representational reality). It is their specific characteristics that makes the actual formation of a separate individual identity possible.1 We are it seems only that and no more than that which others make us, thereby and in consequence live a condition of existent reality made in relation to those differing other(s) that are in some part alienated as the ‘not us’.2 This contemporary view is by now far removed from the ‘subjective ‘I’’ of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum; the belief in a purely insular subjectivity of ‘self proof’, or of a self-generated identity that has long ago slipped away.3 We are made in the world, by the world, and for the world. But in the forming of an inter-subjective self-conscious sense of identity, its formation is necessarily constituted by the multiplicities of extraneous consciousness. They act as background to the unbridgeable reality of the unsaying and the unsaid. There is always a gap between what is said or expressed as content, and the act of saying or expressing it. The reader as a result becomes uniquely the text of their own world, and this can only be the basis for the forming of an identity.

The relevance of these simple observations comes immediately to the fore when considering the art work of Zuzanna Janin, whose film and video practice, alongside her installations and three dimensional objects, frequently addresses ideas of social construction and formation of interactive singular and/or group identities. More specifically how both singular and collective identities are manipulated and played off against one another in today’s contemporary culture. A singular identity thus finds itself –  as Janin makes us aware – in a continuous state of personal construction and displacement. in relation to the Other as experienced.4 This is the necessary condition of the projections born of our conscious and unconscious daily self-making. How we form and shape and thereafter transmit the nature of our personal identity through social and cultural interaction, whether by specifically conscious intentions or otherwise, is crucial to an understanding the artist Janin’s work. The shaping of identity is made in time and by circumstances, and it is not something that is a pre-given. This is most evident in her recent and ongoing major video serial project Majka from the Movie (2009), which is yet to be finally completed.

The five part video serial Majka from the Movie takes as its point of departure and as a framing narrative a television soap opera of sorts, called the Madness of Majka Skowron (1975), a popular series made in Poland in the mid-seventies and still shown. The original series story was based on a generational conflict between a father and adolescent daughter, as a result of which the latter (the artist as a young actress – Zuzanna Antoszkiewicz) runs away from home and spends the summer on an island, where she is assisted by a young man. The archetype of the lost heroine (Miranda) and the young man (a would be Ferdinand) draws loosely on the Shakespeare play The Tempest. The second Majka `09 with filmed elements directed and intercut by the artist (and in fact the daughter of Janin) is both a simile of the first character, and an extended metaphor of Janin as filmmaker.

By using her daughter as both an extension and part of her own personal identity formation, the artist presents herself both in front of an behind the camera. Indeed, throughout the five parts of the video serialisation the periodic intercutting or splicing in of Majka, and also her contemporary re-incarnation or life projection, operate as the shared unity against a backdrop or compendium of personal film and music appropriations that encompasses the metonymic (a contiguity of association between two ideas), metaphor (notions of comparative similarity) and continuous similes (shared aspects or common features).

The overarching thematic is that of a personal journey of identity, both mental and physical, one that is developed through the film and musical culture of the last forty years. Though each of the five parts may be read serially (or episodically as in the original television series), they are better understood if read in terms of simultaneous five screen channels or monitor(s) installation. To merely concentrate on one at a time is largely to miss the point of the artist’s greater undertaking, and also fails to recognise that the different lengths of the five looped parts in the juxtaposition of their contents develops through a continuous state of changed visual relations. At the same time the use of a fragmentary post-narratological approach adopted by Janin both broaches and exposes the nature of today’s media assimilation, and reflects the increasingly mediated synchronicity of events as experienced in the contemporary world.5 It also avoids the danger of an allegorical or homiletic reading as we pass from what appears an idealistic or pseudo-utopian provincial world, with what is a small scale act of teenage rebellion and experimentation, to the dystopian wider world presented by the numerous film, animation, and musical sources brought together in Janin’s film project as a whole. While there is a temptation is to try to read the work as an extended metaphor or simile of the Polish cultural and historical experience of the last forty years, it would be a simple error take such an literalist approach. The film stands as a whole only for itself (the impersonal Levinas-ian ‘there is’ or givenness of being there as a point of departure), as an imaginary journey of creative personal formation, and as a threading together and assimilation of perceived experiences of a life and encountered otherness. This is the intention even though the intercut film sources have obviously been carefrully chosen by the artist-filmmaker Janin. Hence Majka is cast as a lost heroine on a pilgrimage to find the completion of her second self in relations to experiences that are presented to her by cultural manifestations of otherness.

The first part The Way juxtaposes the sense of journey and escape that is embraced by the lost heroine(s) Majka. If the footage of Madness of Majka Skowron denotes much that is familiar from Polish film making in the seventies, the sharper focus and more exotic immediacy of Janin’s film images immediately suggests a far wider world of contemporary complexity. This is added to by such film locations as cherry-blossom in Japan, London and Warsaw, and highlights the singularity of the second Majka set against the backdrop of diverse ethnic difference. A world of familiarity and difference is therefore immediately created between the two adolescent girls and their composite identities. The cross referencing of the two Majka(s) is deliberately left opaque and unresolved. Before the second Majka’s journey begins – apparently at Warsaw railway station – she meets the contemporary guru and social theorist Slavoj Žižek, and solicits from him who and what she should seek out on her cultural journey. He speaks repeatedly of “don’t look for role models, look for role acts,” or “I don’t think you should look for people to identify with, you should look for concrete acts.” It is, perhaps, this conversation which lays down indirectly, or at least parallels, the basis for the actions and events that occur within the derived material film sources, and follow on as the accompanying events and displaced experiences of the two Majka(s) unfold on the subsequent journey. It is inevitable that filmmaking is always about the immediacy of actions (the enacted moment) since it is a time-based media, and consists of sequential actions and events no matter how discernibly small or large they may be. Even in those instances where there is no direct visual action in a film, there is always the enactment of the passage of time. Temporality and the nature of a-temporality (displaced time) become explicit within the cultural journey of the Majka(s) as they proceed. An outline of periodicity and temporal passage is developed, firstly, by the accompanying local music of the 1970s softer Polish blues and rock band Mira Kubasinska & Breakout, of the artist’s youth, contrasted in the latter part with Polish hardedge rock music of Dżem [pronounced as Jam – translator’s note], a drug addicted suicide of the 1980s. Hence sound and image becomes integral and forms the second sensory journey, a corollary understanding of the evolving Majka from the Movie project as a whole. It is constantly present and plays with, and at times against, the tone of the film images that accompany it.

The second part 70s shows the earlier Majka as she appears to embrace her father, the implied rupture and beginnings of the television narrative in the first instance. It at the same time reflects the beginnings of an increasing intensity and plurality of appropriated contents that will occur on the Majka(s) subsequent journey. While there remains an emphasis or predominance of home grown appropriations, like the Polish and award-winning animated short film Tango (1980), Wajda’s Man of Marble (shot at the time of an emerging Solidarity) and the popular Polish comedy The Cruise (1972), other wider cultural forms or nubs of associative identity are increasingly teased out in the film. A car scene from Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), prior to the last violent desert explosion, is echoed in the cut to the second Majka’s driving the car. Michelangelo Antonioni’s film is always seen as one suggesting states of socio-psychological rupture, its leading characters (and the actors real lives as people) are themselves political and cultural rebels, who escape into alternative lifestyles of the 1970s. What is evoked is a sense of an alienated otherness, something developed further by the intercut elements of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), where the evocation is one of a return to a seeming natural or raw state of alternative being. Film and reality, images of projected experience, are thus set out as visual platforms of different enacted and experienced moments. Images that are increasingly expanded upon as references through the different parts of Majka from the Movie as the journey continues.

A tension is created in this way between cultural assimilation, and the identification or associated effects to the first or second persona of Majka at hand, and whose felt responses deliberately remain unclear. It is important also not to read the experienced events and presented actions as if they were mere visualised diary entries along Majka’s imagined journey, since the visual effects are overwhelmingly kaleidoscopic rather than simply collated.

Things thereafter become faster and ever extended experiences and accumulations. In the third part BEFORE or AFTER, other social categories of wider cultural experience are included. An abrupt meeting with Iggy Pop, where the two Majka’s in black and white footage are spliced into a meeting initially replacing Tom Waits, and taken from Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes (1986-2003).7

Scenes with the Majka(s) and Jarmusch’s  anti-cowboy movie Dead Man (1985) follows immediately, cutting back into the Iggy Pop and Waits, source, but in this instance with Waits responding as intercut and displaced from his original context.8 The Majka(s) flow into and out of these fragmented moments, listening and escaping in an increasing shoal of differing visual options. Intense desire and drug induced sexual eroticism is suggested as an alternative extreme, perhaps, to the adolescent or naïve love vaguely intimated by the first Majka’s fantasist escape. Shots from Tarkovsky’s alien science fiction film Stalker (1979) and Mirror (1968-75, 1983), a semi-autobiographical tale of memory and recollection, reflect upon and also begin to introduce hallucinatory language, dream, longing, desire and whispering. This conventional use of iconic films of cultural formation, composites that have become clichés in retrospect, is an implied means by Janin of loosening and opening out experiences that become ever more intense to the journeying Majka(s).

In parts four and five HERE or THERE and FUN FUN FUN, a welter of dystopian film materials counterpoint each other, beginning with the desert drive from Zabriskie Point (1970), contrasted to scenes from the nightmarish film by Valerio Zurlini, The Desert of the Tartars (1976), filmed on location at the destroyed citadel of Bam in Iran.9 Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1986) appears again  as another obvious counter-narrative, as does John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981). They are images which further the general idea of haunting and anxious expectation. These elements are broken down by references to Polish crime serials and comedy take-offs of Communism. There is a continuous thread of expectation, disorientation, impending or threatened violence and release, David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), Roman Polanski’ The Pianist (2002), and the film reconstruction of the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto, intercut with the Laurence Oliver as the Nazi Dr Christian Szell from Marathon Man (1976), Rambo: First Blood (1982), Emir Kusterica’s Underground (1995), each in turn are manifested against aspects of the two Majka(s) possessed and absorbed fascination, partial identity, and subsequent flight as they are placed in a series of detached observing relations. The fourth part finishes with images of violence and mayhem, desire and sensual abandonment, concluding with Nagisa Ōshima’s Empire of Passion (1978), and with the death and last words of Kurtz expressing his expiring exorcism of ‘the horror’.

FUN FUN FUN, is a sensory overload which uses many of the film sources already cited, but with a greater emphasis placed on science fiction, including Manga comics such as Arjuna Daughter of the Earth (2001), excepts from three of the Star Wars films (sequel and prequel) (George Lucas, 1977, 1983, 2005) Alien Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Juenet, 1997), Matrix (Andy and Lana Wachowski, 1999), and classic genre films like Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). The point to be made is that there is an expanded sense of female heroine identity emerging within the series of films and footage chosen. Whether it is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea (1969), or Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) and Kill Bill 1 (2003), or the sensual Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), the women possess an increased autonomy and a sense of personal free choice. Indeed, there may also be an ironic take on Robert Altman’s Three Women (1977) having ‘fun…fun…fun’ hinting of the two Majka’s and the hidden supporting character Janin herself. Whether this is intended is not really that important, but the increased emphasis placed on female-led narrative sources is immediately apparent and reflects, perhaps, intentionally, a major shift in filmmaking in the intervening period. The musical accompaniment takes on a increasingly forceful presence, with the already mentioned Dzem, Pink Floyd, film footage and music by The Doors (Oliver Stone, 1991), as well as the late King of Pop, Michael Jackson. Throughout, however, the theme music of Mira Kubasinska & Breakout remains as a continuous unifying aspect tied to the original source of serialisation.

Seen as a whole and presented across five screens Majka from the Movie, presents a kaleidoscopic life of synthesis spanning the last forty years. However, it should not be read as a simple accumulation of life sources out of which the identity of the Majka character has been made. Rather it gives greater insights into the filmmaker Janin herself, since she has chosen the cultural nubs of recognition as to the contents that contribute to the making of a life and an identity. They are the cultural ‘other’ out of which ‘identifying identity’ is made a necessary possibility. They are the ‘there is’, but an infinite space still remains, between what can be assimilated and what is actually assimilated to forge and create a singular sense of personal identity. The asymmetrical and temporal episodic format presents a mirror of mediated synchronicity. A synchronicity that is structured as a journey, but conversely is as much about the nature of how we assimilate the world of the continuous present as against the variety of cultural sources we derive from the past. Our experience of them is part of our contemporary consciousness, and this remains the necessary meaning regardless of the historical moment  whence they were first presented.

_________________________________________________

ALL THAT MUSIC! (2009) is a video work that acts as something of a counter-current to Majka from the Movie, which is a compendium of retrieved sources of exterior otherness. The seven component elements of All That Music! concerns a greater sense of interiority in the making of an identity through music. Less about the notion of a temporal journey it relates to the self-construction of an inner sound world of identity. The interiority is expressed by the six young male musicians creating their relations to music in the privacy of their bedrooms and/or a domestic interiors. It is never explicitly made clear as to whether these musician constitute a band as such. A final component called Rehearsal (Homage to John Cage) is a film shot through the window of a rehearsal room of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. The last is silent except for the extraneous street noise of passing cars sometimes reflected in the windows, and of people walking and talking or just rushing by. There is therefore a specific interlude or disinterested passage (a lack of immediate awareness) and detachment implied by this component of the film. In Rehearsal the viewer/listener can only project an imagined musical outcome to the directed and orchestrated sound events taking place behind the closed window. Variable intensities of involvement and displacement are thus made to occur

However, what is unique to the DVD work, is the fact of a complexity of relations between part and whole. Only the viewer is made party to a potential concert realisation of the six separate musicians and their individual music sessions. Again as with her earlier videos the work is made in the mind of the reader/listener who must integrate for themselves the separately manifested music sessions. The viewer and listener becomes part of the ‘gestalt’ or field of integration, that is between the distinct musical parts or sessions, that are then put together as an imagined outcome and which is never fully defined. It is hardly surprising therefore that the origins of psychological ‘gestalt’ begins with a theory of music and later film, and in consequence became the basis of field and form psychology by Werthheimer and Arnheim.10 The psychology of sounds and its phenomenology of presence, is expressed through the bodies of the young musicians and gives shape to the visual experience. Janin is intensely interested in the issues thrown up by the self-involvement exhibited by the young male musicians.

In the case of Wiktor who is manipulating an acoustic guitar, simultaneously strumming and innovating sounds, we are left to consider whether we are party to a mere practice session or stages of personal composition. The posture of his body and its relationship to instrument reflects all the tics and anxieties of states of personal introspection, enacted as if he were pretending to be completely unaware of the camera. The psycho-physiology of self-presence is therefore extremely important in each of the filmed elements. Zones of comfort are sometimes disrupted by moments of vexation in relation to each instrument. In the case of Ignacy W who plays the upright piano, at a given moment he turns and speaks to the camera as if expressing a feeling of self-consciousness.

The second Ignacy B who is playing the electric guitar is more enclosed both physically and emotionally in his world, never at any point making eye contact with the camera, and whose floppy hair largely covers his face throughout the session. The point being that they each idiomatically ‘have there own bag’ and emphasise different points of sound engagement or specific interests. It is only when we come to Jędrek, the vocal component, that we eventually realise that the six musicians almost certainly represent a band or ensemble. And, it is with Jędrek, not surprisingly that the sense of performance becomes foregrounded with his self-conscious awareness of the camera and another person in the room. The voice doubling necessarily as a social instrument. In contrast Paweł the drummer is locked in his own world wearing earphones and facing the wall. The band is completed by the bass guitarist Piotrek Pluto, whose accomplishment and aspired mastery is, perhaps, echoed by an icon of inspiration seen in the poster of Jimi Hendrix directly on the wall behind him.

The conditions that shape this world of music is suggested not only by the social-cultural aspects of the instruments that each young musician uses to express their musical identities, but the implied intimate and private world that surrounds them in each instance. We are made voyeurs of their private worlds, and infer or imagine life biographies through their personal associations and surrounding belongings. The six young men could be from anywhere in the Western world, and their dress and physical behaviour suggests that they emblematise a typological youth through their similarity of appearance. Clothes though they apparently pertain to individualism, only do so within a limited sense of prevailing attitudes to fashion and group identity. They are period ciphers that in but a few years will reflect their time and place. Nonethless the viewer therefore tends to build a group identity through these associations. There are the familiar sneakers, posters, art inferences, and popular graphics. They remain in terms of their initial presentation a temporarily displaced group or band ensemble. Group identities suggest a certain sublimation into a whole, but Janin makes us intensely aware of each singular identity. It is one of the paradoxes of music that the listener can mentally extrapolate a single instrument from within a band, or they can listen to the band sound as a whole. However, the listener can never listen to each singular instrument within a performance at the same time. This may be one of the many reasons why rock bands frequently feature solo instruments in their performances. A creative tension is always present in all forms of peer group identity. It is the psychical displacement necessary to creating a separate human identity or existence.

What remains clear, however, is what Zuzanna Janin exposes are the complexities of the relation between the instruments parts and their inferred or possible whole in performance. The parts, however, never create a complete or unified whole, but are presented as shifting realities depending on the particular setting for their installation at the time of exhibition. This is just one of the reasons why when the work in presented by the artist, she often incorporates separate sculptural elements, like Silence (24h) or other works from her wider artistic practices.

The second reason is that we know today that the summation of parts never create a certain whole, a totality may be achieved, but a totalising is an accumulation and not a whole. Hence my earlier reference to the issues thrown up by music as gestalt. And, it is this that reminds us that if there were any sense of a meaningful whole to be made, it must be made by the viewer and that ‘whole’ is one that is individually personal. This is how our modern ideas of personal identity are constituted. It is again the inexplicable unsaying of the unsaid that must be left to the viewer in their completion of the work. An artistic practice today is necessarily left open-ended to a variable sense of received comprehension, and All That Music! presents itself in just this way.

The most recent works Majka from the Movie and All That Music! are, perhaps only be fully understood within the wider scope of Zuzanna Janin’s evolution as an artist. It is important to note that her video and film works evolve over long periods of time as unfolding projects. For example a work like FIGHT (2001-2008) was a long investigation of role identity and behaviour within the boxing ring. Installed in different ways as round projections, or ‘white boxing ring’, the films are not to be thought of in any analytical or moralising sense, but rather as sights or role locations and their performative actions. Janin is deeply interested in how roles are formed and performed and how persons adopt and adapt to the identities associated with them.

In FIGHT (SHE) and FIGHT (HE) (2001), a male and female boxer are presented separately as if boxing to the camera. The viewer is thereby made a witness to the performative contents expressed by their performing roles. Apparently no attempt is made to create any pre-determined or value judgements as against the gender roles that are presented. The performance of roles and human responses are the subject of I’ve Seen My Death (2003-2006), in which one film Funeral & Fun (Ceremony and Games) juxtaposes on screen the ceremonial aspects of death and those of game playing presented on either screen or monitors. Another part of this work is the self-imagined passing away of artist by seven different deaths, called 7 Deaths (Seven Deaths/Seven Ghosts) (2003-2005) or a third part called simply Masonry (2003).

Janin is also interested in how patterns of behaviour follow threads of repetition. In Streets (2003) she retraced the routes she had taken daily in her periods at primary school, high school, and when she was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. Here again we see in cameo, as it were, the idea of a relived experience that are also a re-appropriation of life events, and which as a result displaces their original contents into another more immediate time period.

Relations to a past identity are also evident in the works called In Between (Daughters) (2005) and In Between (Sons) (2008), which are filmed room installations where three men and three women, speak of their shared and conflicting generational anxieties.  The room settings are both different, the Daughter’s room being cross-generational domestic objects, and television monitor, while conversely the Sons room is made up of childhood memorabilia like boys’ toys and a teddy bear, and a plasma screen presentation. The distinction seems to suggest what is a home or domestic space to one, is a shelter or den to another, and touches upon the gender specifics that form a sense of individual identity and memory.  The use of gesture and hand behaviour are found in a video called Fortune (2008), where women’s and men’s hands perform domestic or reassuring actions such as handshaking, touching or caressing. The psycho-physiology of hand-tasking is then transferred to tasks of mechanical dexterity in texting or typing, and where subsequently utility is replaced by the performed hand actions that are used in palmistry and fortune-telling.

The ephemeral and the intangible nature of an action and embodiment, something that cannot ever be fully grasped is central to Zuzanna Janin’s video filmmaking. But it is intimately linked also to her sculptural installations which have always simultaneously been part of her practice, and frequently accompany he video installations. There is a strong sense of ephemeral and transparent structures, where skin like fabrications produce metaphors of the intangible habitations of existence.

In works like COVER (Home) (1992), CORNER I (1995), and CORNER II ((1995), she reveals much of the ‘seen through’ nature found in the frangible lives we live. In THE DOORS (Homage to Harold Szeemann) (1998), matters are pared down to the limit, as a serial sequence of doors fabricated from copper wire. An idea she returned to in the following year in a work simply called CAR (1999). Janin’s more recent examples play with material extremes of the inert and the sensual. Her works PASYGRAPHY (SOLARIS I), PASYGRAPHY (SOLARIS II), PASYGRAPHY (Homage to Bellmer), represent floor-based sculptural configurations of bricks, socks, tights and pantyhose, and in the latter case a string vest.

The PASGRAPHY series still occupies the artist as seen from PASYGRAPHY (SOLARIS III). The viewer is thereby aesthetically tested by this opaque series of works which play with hard and soft, flexible elasticity on the one hand, and apathetic matter on the other. The artist’s sculptural creations have to be seen not only as co-equal but as a natural extension of her works as an artist-filmmaker. The extended appropriation and redirection of found material and their properties, is not fundamentally different from the appropriation and re-directed contents she finds in material film sources, or the observed  interstitial aporia (or doubt) of our daily lives. It is fair to say that the creative other of our identities, the accumulated contents that relate both to ourselves and the world, are the essential building bricks of the personal sense of self. As stated earlier we are of the world, by the world, and for the world, and why should we ever want to think otherwise?

Mark Gisbourne

Berlin, Sunday, 03 January 2010

_________________________________________
endnotes

¹ Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) took the term ‘other’ and ‘otherness’ from Freud (der and das Andere), creating

a distinction between the capitalised Autre and autre (or objet petit a). The former represents the ‘Otherness’ that supersedes the illusionary visual or perceived image generated by the ego (the Imaginary) and its projection autre, and places Autre as a radical alterity within the individual subject as part of the Symbolic order, that is to say with an ‘Other’ subject (in the context of psychoanalysis this would be the Symbolic role of the analyst), and is grounded in the language and the Law. See, La chose freudienne (The Freudian Thing) and La psychanalyse et son enseignement (Psychoanalysis and its teaching), both appear in Lacan’s Ecrits, Paris, Seuil, 1966 (and subsequent editions), pp. 401-436, 437-458. For a short account of their more precise distinctions, see Malcolm Bowie, Lacan, London Fontana Moderm Master, London1991, pp. 80-84 Or, alternatively the second chapter of Slavoj Žižek’s How to Read Lacan, London, Granta Books, 2006.

² The Lithuanian-French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995), first coined the term the ‘Other’ as an ethical subjectivity, and as an infinite pre-condition of our ‘being’ prior to traditional perception or object-based metaphysics Though it has both a Fichte and Hegelian antecedence. Truth and its nature are founded upon the reality of understanding the ‘Other’, and in consequence deeply bound up in issues of language and representation. See Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974, and Le Livre de Poche 2004), (Eng. trans, Alphonso Lingus, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Pittsburgh,Duquesne University Press, 1999); also Humanism de l’autre homme (Fata Morgana, Paris, 1972) (Eng., Richard A. Cohen (intro), Nidra Poller (trans.) Humanism of the Other, University of Illinois Press, repub. 2006).

³ René Descartes (1596-1950), the term cogito ergo sum is first fully defined and used in Latin Principia philosophiae (1644) and in French edition as Principes de la philosophie (1647), though the cogito is implicit to his earlier Discours de la méthode (1637)

⁴ The term ‘displacement’ is used here both in a literal and psychological sense, the latter being forms of aggressive or sexual social defence mechanisms, scapegoating, and numerous escapist behavioural rationalisations that forge a sense ‘separateness’. Though grounded in language it can also be extended into the visual field of representation. Displacement thus lies at the heart or our discerning a sense of personal difference.

⁵ The use of the term ‘post-narratology’ implies here a post-structural reading insomuch the post-structuralists argue that the signifier and signification are inseparable but are not united, and as a result there is a play of difference. This is in distinction from traditional theories of structuralist narratology which privileges the signifier. Janin’s video serial as indicated uses this through the role of metonymy (separate that is from any sense of a metanarrative), since it plays with ideas of viewer association and an irresolvable difference – they can never be fully united. To consider the beginnings of modern structuralist narrative analysis see, Tzvetan Todorov Grammaire du Décaméron, 1969, and most importantly Vladimir Propp Morphology of the Folktale, 1928. For post-structural analyses, consult the writings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva.

⁶ Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et Infini: essai sur l’extériorité, Paris, 1961 (Eng trans., Alfonso Lingis, Totality and Infinity, London, 1999.

⁷ The appropriated scene is derived from the three short films entitled Coffee and Cigarettes (1986, 1989, 1993), these three shorts were incorporated in a larger completed film of the same title, which was eventually finished by Jim Jarmusch in 2003. The 1993 short containing the Iggy Pop and Tom Waits conversation was called Coffee and Cigarettes - Somewhere in California was therefore part of the 2003 film that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival, in 2004.

⁸ It is important to realise that Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1985), is a film that pays homage in part to the work of English poet William Blake, hence the Indian character Nobody recites lines from the poem Auguries of  Innocence (1803). The relevance being that other lines ‘Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night’ are quoted byJim Morrison in the song End of the Night by The Doors (first album), and the group turns up in part five of Majka from the Movie.

⁹ The film is based on a novel by Dino Buzzati called The Tartar Steppe (1940). and deals with  an army officer who spends his life waiting for a Tartar Army that never comes,. The Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee based part of his book Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) on the same novel.

¹⁰ Christian von Ehrenfels, ‘Über Gestaltqualitäten’ Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, vol. 14, pp. 249-292. Gestalt psychology traditionally begins with the Jewish Czech psychologists Max Wertheimer (1880-1943), who took it from the Institute of Psychology (University of Berlin) to the New School in New York, in 1933, Kurt Koffka (1886-1941), Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967) who both similarly left Berlin for America after the Nazis came to power In Germany. Its influence on art and musical culture in the USA was enormous, particularly through Wertheimer‘s assistant and later major film and visual arts theorist Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007), who became Professor for the Psychology of Art at Harvard University, see Film as Art, University of California Press, 2006 (Orig. 1932 in German), and Art and Visual Perception, University of California, 2004. All of his major fifteen books remain in print.

OLD SORES MUST (NOT) BE RE-OPENED?

Introduction to “Ignoble” Critique

Who’s an ignoble critic? It’s somebody who feels relative of iniquitous figures from modern myths. Being relative, however, does not prevent him from involving in reliable, if radical, critique, since, as we remember from a Centuries-old aphorism, “it takes similar to know what similar is” (Sextus Empiricus).

Ignoble critic is one who opens old sores. Who does this in order to provoke a cry of despair or bliss. But not only that – he also does it to set voices of condemned phantasms and metaphors free. Such a critic believes that stitched and scarred mouth of the Damned have to be opened since it is their speech that makes us aware we are in fact mostly what we are ashamed of and what we force out.

Ignoble critic thus unleashes representations cursed and listens closely to their say. In this he occurs someone very decent – after all he liberates rather than colonises. This is his crucial merit: he wants not to colonise fantasy. He’s not driven by mission of carrying modernization forth in order to harness representations to politically correct work or engaging them to service for the sake of conventions in force at present. Ignoble critic allows disgraceful phantasms to create a new sovereign Mordor, in which the “charm” is hidden, supplanted beyond the borders of modernity (or overcome thereby, if only seemingly).

Tomasz Kozak in his exhibition OLD SORES MUST (NOT) BE RE-OPENED? presents three found footage projects. The first – Yoga Lesson (2007) – analyses similarities between the Aryan Myth and mythology created by late-modern movies. Another – Negroisation. Exhumation of a Certain Metaphor (2006) – reveals overlapped black self-portraits of “executioner” and “victim” – two writers who, just after the end of WW2 used the figure of a Negro in their writings in order to represent the fall of European culture (Ernst Jünger, a Captain of Wehrmacht, one of the prominent representatives of German Conservative Revolution being the “executioner” and Tadeusz Borowski, a prisoner of Dachau, a poet gravitating towards the left and the author of famous stories from concentration camps). The third project – Song of Sublime (2008) – penetrates the space of cinematographic phantasms in search of what is sacred, understood (in line with the etymology of the word sacer) as “sublime” and “holy”, while at the same time “polluted” and “damned”.

_______________________________________________________T.K.

OLD SORES MUST (NOT) BE RE-OPENED?

Wprowadzenie do krytyki „niegodziwej”

Kim jest „niegodziwy” krytyk? To ktoś, kto czuje się „spokrewniony” z „niecnymi” figurami nowoczesnych mitów. „Pokrewieństwo” nie przeszkadza mu jednak w rzetelnej i radykalnej krytyce, jak bowiem głosi pradawna mądrość: „podobne daje się poznać tylko podobnemu” (Sextus Empiricus).

Krytyk „niegodziwy” jest kimś, kto otwiera stare rany. Robi to po to, by wywołać krzyk rozpaczy albo rozkoszy. Ale nie tylko – robi to także, aby wyzwolić głosy potępionych fantazmatów i metafor. Krytyk ten wierzy, że zaszyte i zabliźnione usta Potępionych trzeba otworzyć, ponieważ to właśnie ich mowa uświadamia nam, że w ogromnym stopniu jesteśmy tym, czego się wstydzimy i wypieramy.

Krytyk „niegodziwy” wyzwala zatem wyklęte wyobrażenia i z uwagą słucha ich mowy. Okazuje się wówczas kimś nader „przyzwoitym” – jest wszakże wyzwolicielem, a nie „kolonizatorem”. To jego największa „cnota”: on nie chce „kolonizować” fantazji. Nie przyświeca mu „cywilizacyjna” misja, której celem byłoby zaprzęgnięcie wyobrażeń do poprawnej politycznie pracy albo wcielenie ich do służby na rzecz aktualnie obowiązującej konwencji. Krytyk „niegodziwy” pozwala „haniebnym” fantazmatom utworzyć suwerenny Mordor, w którym kryje się „czar” wyparty poza granice „nowoczesności” (lub pozornie przez nią przezwyciężony).

Tomasz Kozak na wystawie OLD SORES MUST (NOT) BE RE-OPENED? zaprezentuje trzy projekty found footage. Pierwszy – Yoga Lesson (2007) – analizuje podobieństwa między Mitem Aryjskim a mitologią kreowaną przez późno-nowoczesne kino komercyjne. Drugi – Negroisation. Exhumation of a Certain Metaphor (2006) – ukazuje nakładające się na siebie „czarne” autoportrety „kata” i „ofiary” - dwóch pisarzy, którzy tuż po zakończeniu II wojny światowej posługiwali się w swoich pismach figurą „Murzyna”, by zobrazować katastrofę europejskiej kultury („katem” jest Ernst Jünger, kapitan Wehrmachtu i jeden z czołowych przedstawicieli niemieckiej Rewolucji Konserwatywnej, „ofiarą” zaś – Tadeusz Borowski, więzień Dachau, lewicujący poeta, autor słynnych opowiadań obozowych). Trzeci z projektów – Song of Sublime (2008) – penetruje otchłań kinematograficznych fantazmatów w poszukiwaniu tego, co „sakralne”, czyli (zgodnie z etymologią słowa sacer) „wzniosłe” i „święte”, a jednocześnie „skażone” i „przeklęte”.

T.K.

MAJKA FROM THE MOVIE (Szaleństwo Majki Skowron / Madness of Majka Skowron, 1975), 2009, DVD

Found footage art video serial episodes by Zuzanna Janin:

The WAY, 2009, DVD, loop, 15’54’’
70’s, 2009, DVD, loop, 13’16’’
BEFORE or AFTER, 2009, DVD, loop, 13’16’’
HERE or THERE, 2009, DVD, loop, 22’53’’
FUN FUN FUN, 2009, DVD, loop, 30’38’

trailer by Tomasz Kozak

Skelter&Shelter, 2009, DVD, 18′12”

Episodes can be added each to other in different way so they will composed as a short experimental art video film.

70’s, 2009, DVD, loop, 13’16’’
episode from the video serial: MAJKA FROM THE MOVIE (Szaleństwo Majki Skowron / Madness of Majka Skowron, 1975), 2009, DVD

Short description (fragments)

Majka from the Movie is Poland’s first artistic video series, consisting (so far) of 6 short art videos, made by Zuzanna Janin (5 episodes) in collaboration with Tomasz Kozak (a trailer). The series uses the found footage technique, composing scenes from Polish TV serial for teenegers from 1970’s, entitled Szaleństwo Majki Skowron Madnesss of Majka Skowron), as well as from many American and European movies from the last 40 years. Some scenes were shot by the artist in our days, in various places, including Poland, England, US, Japan and elsewhere. The protagonist is a teenage girl travelling in both space and time, not only in historical and geographic plans but also in the sphere of culture.

During her journey Majka, a cult, rebel character who “escapes” from the frame of original serial and begins to wander across the area of culture, faces a lot of different situations, events, meeting people - real person as well as characters from movies - and finding herself within film scenes. She talks to prominent figures from the areas of science and philosophy (as Slavoj Žižek) or pop-culture (actors and singers, such as Iggy Pop or Tom Waits). Majka observes, listens, asks questions. Where did she come from and where is she bound? What is her journey’s end? It is not any specific place to reach. Instead, I suppose, Majka finds a true goal in searching for the very sense of existence in social and cultural context as she looks and finds or rather builds her own identity.

The way Zuzanna Janin approaches the problem seems very interesting, also because she made a young girl, Majka, who alongside, travels across culture the principal character (she called her “the missing heroine” in one interview). This is in opposition to tradition of European culture where the roles of those who seek their own identities and gradually find or discover them via a journey, either internal or real, were almost always played by men. Zuzanna Janin, speaking up for women’s experience, restores the right proportions.

“(…) She appears in places she neither has ever been nor she could even be before. For example, she couldn’t have met Colonel Kurtz / Marlon Brando in Vietnamese forests. Now she is there and witnesses his death. She was not on the desert in Zabriskie Point, where a girl – the film protagonist – wandered with her boyfriend and where she blew up a villa she regarded a symbol of capitalism and its values. Now Majka is that girl and it’s she who blows the house up. I shot a lot of additional footage, in which an actress’ daughter played. She acts Majka in the additional footage I needed, but Majka in fact wanders all over the world as I did the shooting it in Tokyo, in Miami, in London, anywhere. This gives me a dual character, Majka from 1975 / Majka from 2009 is the one heroine, at the same time meets various people, identifying herself with some of them – as she does with the girl in Zabriskie Point. Other times she remains indifferent, as when she falls asleep and misses all the final scenes of Uma Thurman fighting in Kill Bill. Then, on the contrary, in fragments of Rybczyński’s Tango she becomes one of the key figures. And she goes on again and meets Ripley from Alien. As they both watch what the science fiction culture created over time, Majka unexpectedly finds herself in Tarkowski’s Solaris. Later on she meets Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s feature film The Doors. All these adventures are divided into episodes, six of them so far. In one, entitled The Way she’s on the run all of the time: fleeing across Tokyo, forests, jungle, until she ends up at the Warsaw Central Station, meets Žižek and asks him who she should meet in her journey through the land of culture. “Look not for people” - he answers. “Instead, look for what they do. These are miracles”. Thanking him, she goes on. This is all very symbolic. “ (…)

Zofia Starikiewicz, Poznan 2009

Quotes from the catalogue interwiev by Kamila Wilebska with Zuzanna Janin, Warsaw 2009

“Robakowski’s work is stubbornly autonomic. For decades it remained resistant to dominant trends, preferring cognitive and expressive function to surrendering to current events of artistic life, but becoming, at the same time, its important creative element.”

Józef Robakowski, born in 1939 in Poznań, dedicated all his artistic activity to the inquiry of the nature of film. The artist chose to spend most of his life in Łódź, the city where the circle of Polish pre-war artistic avant-garde once flourished, where the Muzeum Sztuki, first museum of modern art in Poland was established, where the National Film School educated dozens of prominent Polish film artists, including Roman Polański and Andrzej Wajda.

Robakowski’s experiments on the nature of film tape, on the very conjunction of image and sound, characteristic to that medium, make his work a sort of a follow-up of the grand artistic experiment led by 20th Century avant-garde currents, before it was interrupted by the outburst of WW2. Since late 1950’s Robakowski, in parallel with artistic phenomena seen in Western Europe and in the USA, was exploring the very borders of film and definitely extending them.

Tautological nature of his works is evident in his TEST 1 and TEST 2 from 1971, presented in the exhibition in lokal_30_warszawa_london. This is a screening of a film test, the aim of which was to reach better understanding and insight into the very essence of film projection through deconstruction of the fundamental constitutive elements of that medium.

“Every thing has its full potential hidden deep, but present already at an embryonic stage. This is the essence. Any noble and open-minded soul is going to bring things to perfection, to assist things in realizing that essence, fulfilling that potential. This is love; perfect love of a beloved object.”

Robakowski, as surrealists before him, was not satisfied with traditional scope of technical possibilities the film projection offered. He decided to show a specific nature of film tape and of the source of light as such, rather than as just tools or materials. To that purpose he irregularly perforated the tape so that a flash of pure and direct projector light, not compromised by any sort of filter, beacons at the viewer between intervals of darkness. The blinding stream of light hits the eye, disturbing the viewer’s feeling of comfort and safety, typical to dark cinema room, as described by Umberto Eco.
The principal motive of TEST 1 and TEST 2 is the light flashing in darkness. The play of light and darkness suggests, of course, symbolic meanings of both, rooted so deeply in European culture (no need to mention any more than Ancient aletheia, the beginning of the Christian Bible or Les Lumières).
Evocation of power of the light, conceiving the light as energy is present not only in Robakowski’s films, but in his philosophy, in the way he understands and describes art, as well:
“I am interested in “pure screen”. My TEST – the film from 1971 – being the simplest emission of light upon a screen, reveals that power. In psychological terms it works excellently. Actually, it works till it hurts, as cinema projection is about really strong beam of light, about an energetic force which computer screen doesn’t have at all. Cinema is the power of light, the very magic of it.”

A second film Attention: Light! screened in a separate room of the gallery, made over 30 year later and lending its title to that of the entire exhibition, is the effect of friendship between Robakowski and Paul Sharits.
The film, made in cooperation with Wiesław Michalak, is dedicated to memory of the American structuralist, with whom Robakowski collaborated at the turn of 1970/1980’s. In 1981 Sharits sent to Robakowski the sheet of a film score, suggesting him to use it to shoot a film. The project remained incomplete due to the Martial Law that soon followed in Poland. Eventually, the film was made in 2004. Sharits based its structure upon close synchronicity between musical and visual layers. The film is an effect of extremely rigorous, constructivist formal procedure that subordinated specific visual values to melodic line of a musical piece. During the screening subsequent tones of Frederic Chopin’s Mazurka op. 68 nr. 4 are accompanied on the screen by eight corresponding colours. The vibration of changing colours and emanation of light compose into a coherent composition with that nostalgic piece of piano music. Spots of colour, pulsating to the rhythm of music, combine revocations to structural cinema of the American artist with Robakowski’s emphasis upon vital energy of colour and light.

The choice of works shown, made by Józef Robakowski together with curators of lokal_30_WL is meant to present to British audience the role and particular place of the Artist in history of European art and to highlight close artistic relations between movements evolving in Western and Central Europe.

Michal Suchora

Warszawa, November 2009

Project (…) by Anna Baumgart & Agnieszka Kurant installed over the place where a wooden overpass above the Aryan part of the city linked the Large Ghetto with the Small Ghetto in 1942-43 in Warsaw.

Museum of the History of Polish Jews:

Urban Space Project
Place: Chłodna Street, November/ December 2009

Project (…) is a spatial installation project that fits well with the educational mission of the Museum, best described by the idea “open past” and based on a dialogue of multiple narratives on the subject of the joint Polish-Jewish history, cultivating the memory of coexistence of cultures, but also inviting to critical reflection, without evasion of taboo topics. Conceptual work by Anna Baumgart and Agnieszka Kurant, perceived by them as a kind of “linguistic sculpture” which picks up on the theme of “memory work” in Polish modern art, and explores the boundaries of Warsaw”s contemporary identity, a city for which void and absence are the basic categories of description. The Second World War, during which one third of Warsaw”s inhabitants perished, including near entire Jewish population, put an end to the city”s centuries-long multicultural reality. There disappeared for ever from her urban landscape the architecture of synagogues and from her streets the sounds of Yiddish.

(…), an ephemeral sculpture that defies the laws of gravity will be installed in a symbolic place, over Chłodna street, where during the Second World War there stood the “footbridge”, a wooden overpass above the Aryan part of the city linking the Large Ghetto with the Small Ghetto. The taboo subject the authors of (…) wish to bring up is that of awareness of Poles that mass murder of Jews happened before their very eyes; the inexpressible traumatic experience that casts a shadow on relations between Jews and Poles to this day.

(…) can appear wherever there are unsolvable problems and near inexpressible subjects. (…) is a punctuation mark that represents: “skipping over or omission in a text, a broken thought, a missing element”. As conceived by the authors, (…) crosses the boundaries of history; is travelling installation, a sign for hire; empty space that focuses attention on a taboo that actually exists in memory and culture. The shining surfaces of the balloons will reflect back every element or discourse that nears them.

Commenting on their work, the authors said: The project for us is a catalyst of different, often mutually exclusive meanings. For us art, as opposed to didacticism and politics, is not a mouthpiece or a speaking tube, a presentation of hand-me-down views. We would like to see this art instigate new and unpredictable social situations and touch the things long relegated to collective subconscious in Warsaw”s urban space, so saturated with the traumatic past and so taboo-ridden.
The project is complemented by a cycle of open public debates taking which will be devoted to such topics as: the strategy of absence of memory in Warsaw, the glamour aesthetics as a vehicle for taboo content, the conceptual art, history and irony.

The urban project (…) is also addressed to the local community, the present inhabitants of Chłodna street for whom this may be the first collective experience and an encounter with their street”s Jewish past, hopefully an impulse to building neighbourly relations based on recognition of their street”s history and identity.

Project authors: Anna Baumgart, Agnieszka Kurant

Project curator: Ewa Toniaka Kurant
Projekt coordinator: Karolina Sakowicz

lokal_30
We Would Like You To Know That We Are Not Them

Whether I’m painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I’m not working, I’m still analyzing people.
Kasimir Malevich

Creating a video art exhibition that focuses on the artist’s image and intrinsic self-commentary seems to be a very special task. A piece of art appears to be here a vehicle for remarkable, almost direct encounter of the viewer with the artist.

In the exhibition We Would Like You To Know That We Are Not Them, the artists each show the world from a very distinctive outlook; they adopt the roles of an actor, narrator, commentator or collector of the images of reality, which they witness together with the public. Therefore, they enable us to find themselves in the situations/images which they have created for us.

People mostly tend to put an equation sign between the artist and his/her artwork. However, history shows that this relation has evolved in time. Nowadays, the artist rarely has anything in common with the archetype of the romantic creator held by the power of whimsical inspiration. Among the new roles, one can point out a role of a social critic, and even a kind of intermediary who connects philosophy, anthropology and even sciences with the real fabric of the world.  Furthermore, the artist adopts with increasing frequency, managerial responsibilities of production processes. Consequently, masterhood in the arts is getting abandoned; it results in simple amateur camera shots and homemade video sequences. Simple form and documental features win over creativity and artificiality of film craftsmanship.

One of the most important strategies in contemporary art appears to be the strategy of incarnation, i.e. playing roles which are a kind of simulacrum of real acting. As a result of this strategy, artworks of great authenticity and honesty have been created, strict and rigid, when compared to the other areas of arts, where artists often are trying to astonish or charm the viewer. In these cases, the artist does not charm and does not flirt with the public. Instead, they incorporate themselves into the situation and by their very presence emphasise the meaning of the situation.

Additionally, what should be seen in this context is a need of the artist to experience the world that has been given to them - as if it was not enough for the artist to be an artist; as if it was necessary for them to compensate for the vague status of the contemporary artist by playing an identifiable role of being someone else - a she-boxer, or a romantic heroine from a black and white movie.

In this context, the works of artists who use a technique of introducing their image in already existing films seem particularly interesting. An almost literal instance is the work by Anna Baumgart (3). In her video Prawdziwe? (True?) (2001) by applying the ‘found footage’ technique, she becomes a heroine in the movie by Michail Kalatozov The cranes are flying (1957). [Walter Benjamin is worth citing in this context: "illusion of a movie is a second degree illusion - an outcome of editing." (Tworca i Wytworca, Poznan 1975; orig. ed.: Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen)]. Here, the artist takes advantage of movie technology to edit her own image in place of the actress’. The whole video lasts less than three minutes and presents a dramatic quarrel of lovers. They cannot love each other; the man loves the fiancée of his own brother who went to war but she refuses his advances by crying “niet, niet, niet”. Isn’t it an ultimate heyday of girls’ dreams about being adored and desired by men? But, by mere fact of editing her own face into the famous film product, the artist approaches and fulfils her own dreams of fame, beauty and admiration. In her work, Baumgart critically analyzes how the media influence our imagination. It is thanks to imagination and its internal working patterns. She concludes by default that we can escape at least for a while from reality to become a romantic lover and a movie star.

Another artist to explore the theme of dreams of being somebody else appears to be Zuzanna Janin (2). Her work Walka (Fight)/I Love You Too (2001) consists of a video recording of the fight between the artist and the professional heavy-weight boxer.  One of the important stages of this project was to contact the sportsman and convince him to participate. The next stage consisted of long training sessions to get the artist ready for the fight, and ‘become a boxer’. The clash of contrasts seems to be one possible interpretation of this artwork, but, of course, not the only one. It also can be perceived as a metaphorical presentation of day-by-day struggling with the weaknesses of the artist herself, with the reality of the world, and lastly, as a presentation of clash between the artist and the audiences, both in the media and in society. Zuzanna Janin has put herself in her Fight in the ‘leading lady role’ of the ‘media artist’. This artist is not afraid of the confrontation with the audiences, and has no fear before incarnation into the role of unusual devotion and obstinacy. A large curtain is included in the video work to both surround the performance and also act as a screen on which the ‘Fight’ is projected.

Karol Radziszewski (4), a young artist, publisher and editor of the gay artzine DIK Fagazine, has had challenges of a somewhat different kind to overcome. Usually, he invites his family to take part in his projects. By doing so, he creates a twofold image of himself: a young artist after coming out, consistent in his actions with his preferences on the one hand; and on the other, he appears to be a loving son and grandson, having his close relatives always in mind. As an instance, his grandmother, always ready to support him, often takes part as a leading character in his videos. In Chwalcie laki umajone (Praise the Lord, flowered meadows) (2007) Radziszewski appears as a singer to record, together with his grandmother, a video clip of traditional religious chant. To encounter a rebellious youngster with a devout old lady is not only the game and clash of contraries, but also a critical look at tradition, the unnatural adoption of devout patterns of behaviour, and burdensome restrictions imposed on the culture by religious upbringing. Once again, Radziszewski has created a situation of non-obviousness connected with the essence of the relation between himself and the characters of his works.

Only seemingly less complex are the interactions between characters and authors in works by Elodie Pong (6), a Swiss of American origin, and Jasmina Wójcik (5) from Warsaw. In their projects both women take the roles of interviewers/record-keepers; they aim to direct the conversation and to have control of the discussion to be recorded in their para-documentary videos. Looking at the works of Pong and Wojcik, one cannot escape the questions: to what extent do the authors embody their roles?; Did the conversation appear to be a kind of therapy? And if so, for whom? Jasmina Wójcik in her video Samsara (2009) tries to enter the world of a lonely old woman. Asking simple questions, she provokes answers that reveal the woman’s retreat into the banality of everyday life, petty actions and reminiscences from the past. Despite her attempts, the artist is not able to help the woman, who becomes increasingly isolated from society, obsessed with a missing vase or a sum of money, supposedly hidden by ‘him’, a spiteful man of the lonely woman’s imagination. ‘He’ makes her last moments in life unbearably bitter. The movie ends with a shocking confession of the woman: “There is no way. And I’m constantly in this state of despair. I’m worthless now”.

In her video Secrets for Sale (2003-5), Elodie Pong takes a more ambiguous role than Jasmina Wojcik. Pong’s interviewees have to go through a number of stages in her ’system’ which comprises of coming in to the studio, taking a decision to sell a secret of his/her own, signing a contract, revealing the secret in front of the camera, and then selling the secret to the artist/producer/interviewer for the amount offered. In this way, Pong creates an unusual collection of three hundred secrets. These secrets range from dreams of buying elephant skin couches to ones with more sinister undertones of child abuse. Though an  incredibly intimate experience for her subjects, the artist tries to remain coldly professional, and to fulfil all formal conditions so that her ’system’ would work without interruptions.

The situation is quite different for the artists who are taking on the role of narrator. The voice over, giving comment to a movie, is a factor which makes a video work similar to a documentary film. The main difference between these two consists of the lack of certainty: is the artistic video which we are looking at a totally fictional, recorded reality or a kind of conditioned reality?

Józef Robakowski’s (1) film records the view from his kitchen window. From My Window (1978 - 1999) appears seemingly indifferent yet the author’s commentary about the changes which occurred in Poland during the period subject to the narration seems authentic and highly moving. By using simple camera techniques, Robakowski transposes private things into public problems. He convincingly shows how misleading the view that history and politics do not affect private lives is. According to Debord, “history […] arises as something alien to people, as something they never sought and from which they had thought themselves protected.” (Debord G., Society of the Spectacle, Rebel Press, London, 1983, p.75.) Who knows what the actual dimension of an event or political rally or even an everyday activity is? He is an artist who, by looking “through the eyes of the camera”, can attain a standpoint to lead a narration. As Walter Benjamin puts it: “[...] for today’s man, presentation of reality in a movie is much more important, since, thanks to a profound overwhelming by the technical devices, it reflects non-technical aspects of reality; the viewer is authorized to expect this from the piece of art” (Tworca i Wytworca, Poznan, 1975; orig. ed.: Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen).

Tomasz Kozak (7), a video artist, painter and academic teacher. In Lekcja Jogi (Yoga Lesson) (2007) reveals he reveals himself as an erudite artist-narrator. This video, similarly to the rest of the artist’s work, is produced by using ‘found footage’ method. Scenes from the classic entertainment movies have been confronted here with natural history film sequences, as well as with porn movies. Masterfully selected and edited shots have been complemented with music and spoken text taken from the Polish modernist writer Tadeusz Micinski. A controversial notion developed by Micinski is that of ‘Indian Poland’. Kozak comments “The popular Arian mythology of the 19th century was then anthropologically subverted, and politically and ethically compromised. And now, unexpectedly, this set of ideas appears to be only seemingly obsolete! What the Arian mythology has once argued, nowadays can easily be illustrated by the sequences from such super productions like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. In this context, the conclusion of ‘Lekcja Jogi’ sounds somewhat disturbing - that contemporary culture has forgotten the most tragic moments of modern history. Or, even worse, in spite of remembering, it carelessly makes use of this memory to play with the ideas which are responsible for historical disasters”.

Norman Leto (8) also takes on the role of narrator and guide within a virtual reality made by himself. His narrated video Buttes Monteaux (2009) (30 mins) is part of a forthcoming full-length feature film and book to be published. The artist confesses his sickness of reality, fact and tangibility. He guides us through 3D visualizations which look as if they were real. It is not a surreal world of computer games, full of naive kitsch aesthetics and narration. It is a kind of minimalistic documentation of a digital environment, which tiny delegates ‘live’ in; these are entities of artificial intelligence, programmed by Leto, moving along their own routes. Isn’t it, then, a ‘precession of simulacra’, as well as “models of a real without origin or reality: a hyper real” mentioned by Baudrillard as far back as in 1981? (Baudrillard J., Simulacra and Simulation, The University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 1994). Although Leto defies calling his work an animation, and does not need a camera to make record of dimensions created by him, he, nevertheless, should be ranked among the protagonists of the video art and new media.

Warsztat Formy Filmowej (The Workshop of Film Form) in Lodz (1970 - 1977) was a cradle of Polish video art, with Jozef Robakowski as one of founding fathers. This group had a focus on analyzing the medium, making formal experiments, and trying to implement the advances of film technology into the contemporary arts. In the 90’s, video art succeeded in gaining significance on the Polish arts scene because of critical art accomplishments. Today it is getting a predominant place among arts whilst simultaneously, becoming an increasingly more hybrid art form i.e. pure video is vanishing. More often, a video stands for a part of a larger project/installation, a record of action/performance, takes a form of found footage or computer simulation. By taking a curatorial approach to the relation between an artist and his/her artwork, the exhibition We Would Like You To Know That We Are Not Them enables us to have a closer look into different forms and strategies, how to visualize the world through the video art; since this art activity can be seen as an instrument of cognition with respect to both reality and arts.

Agnieszka Rayzacher
lokal_30

The uniqueness of Małgorzata Szymankiewicz’s paintings consists in the topology of forms and colours in their simplest variation. The subtle and revealing structure of the paintings sets imagination free, sets it in motion and thus results in surprising interpretations.
Colour and form are the most fundamental and difficult areas of artistic pursuits. This has become clear in the oeuvre of the young artist, who has consistently developed it since 2003, when she was still a student of painting at the Poznań Academy of Fine Arts in Prof. Jerzy Kałucki’s studio. At that time Szymankiewicz used a broad and garish palette. Clearly marked yet non-homogenous forms filled with expressive brushstrokes occupy the central position of the paintings, dissecting horizontally their homogenous surface. In successive works one can observe a gradual abstention from the toxicity of colour.
In the years 2004 - 2005 Szymankiewicz achieves a higher degree of mastery over the structure of composition. The works start to feature new forms, which occupy the better part of the painting. This is also the moment of the emergence of the transparency effect. Works from that period could be seen at a collective show www.kaucki.free.art.pl in the Arsenał in Białystok in 2004 as well as during the 2005 Poznań Art Fair.
The paintings of 2005 show a subdued and markedly narrower colour palette. Most of the works no longer have a composition dominant, which becomes absorbed by the uniform background. “Exposure” becomes replaced with “concealment”. A preponderance of blue hues imparts the colours with a symbolic meaning and makes them the principal subject.
The extremely industrious year 2006, when Szymankiewicz had a solo show in the Arsenał in Białystok, gave rise to cycles that on the face of it resemble Klein’s monochromes, which conceal in their midst mysteries of “water” structures. At the same time the artist pursued another direction, focusing on clearly minimalist compositions. In recognition of the artist’s individual work, she was invited to take part in the show “Polish Painting in the 21st Century”, held in the Warsaw Zachęta (2006 - 2007), as well as in the itinerary exhibition “See, What I See” (Łódź, Toruń, Bielsko-Biała, Poznań 2006 - 2007), gathering the most recent art of Poznań. That year she also exhibited her works during the III Berliner Kunstsalon (Berlin, 2006).
Another stage in Szymankiewicz’s art is an unexpected about-face. In a world where spilled modules supplant formal representation, an intruder appears in the form of a glimmer of a palm-studded landscape, becoming clearer in the shape of a water drop. What is new here is a tinge of criticism, which both as to form and as to content becomes consumed during a solo show MIAMI DREAM (Galeria STARTER, Poznań, 2007).
A totally new suite of paintings made for the project 8780h (XRay Gallery, Luboń n. Poznań 2008) comes as a big surprise. Within a dark palette the artist introduces graphic compositions composed of a decentralising ornament. The kaleidoscopic images are built of skulls and bones, which imply that “(…) Sources of art and sources of culture are to be sought  in the cruelty of the primeval sacrifice (…)”1.
The illusion of a reproduced motif brings to mind also Hermann Rorschach’s psychoanalytic ink test, which equally well sums up the visual aspect of Małgorzata Szymankiewicz’s art. Is this a foretaste of the “Attractions of Abstraction” project? In her most recent series of paintings the artist develops the psychoanalytical and critical strain. The interplay between abstraction and attraction “(…) is a reference to contemporary time, when erotism, which has become sin, can hardly survive in a liberal world, where there is no more sin”2. Szymankiewicz thinks along the same lines when she plays with erotic suggestiveness in her works.

Analysis of the artist’s oeuvre so far shows a conspicuous determination and a pursuit of possibilities to come into contact with uninterrupted colour and form of natural biological logic, which makes her works come close to Olafur Eliasson’s installations. The paintings, made for the most part in 2008, along with those the artist presents at this “Attractions of Abstraction” show, bring me to the art of Gerry Hume. I see an affinity primarily in the subtle game of seemingly anonymous forms of painting, which easily lend to cultural associations.
Szymankiewicz’s intriguing stand seems nearly anarchist with respect to hackneyed “local” artistic paths. Małgorzata Szymankiewicz’s painting introduces into young Polish art a separate trend, a phenomenal counterpoint to the figurative tendencies characteristic of present-day art.

Agnieszka Okrzeja

lokal_30 is happy and proud to announce that soon opens

the new space located at East London, England:

lokal_30_project_london / lokal_30_pl

be with us there! we are looking forward to see you there!

lokal_30 team!