1997, Sweet Girl (Zuzanna), copper wire, cotton, candy, courtesy Gallery Nordenhake, Berlin

POLISH ARTISTS  RANK after ARTFACTS world position  July 2010

and selection of  POLISH WOMEN ARTIST RANK after the ARTFACTS world position

Pozycja w Polsce wg artfacts / lipiec 2010 *************************** position after artfacts / July 2010

Pozycja w światowym rankingu Artfacts / lipiec 2010 *********************** artfacts world position / July 2010

1. Katarzyna Kozyra 2. Monika Sosnowska 3. Paulina Ołowska 4. Zuzanna Janin 5. Zofia Kulik 6. Ewa Partum 7. Agnieszka Brzeżańska 8. Anna Baumgart 9. Julita Wojcik 10. Katarzyna Józefowicz 11. Agnieszka Kalinowska 12. Joanna Rajkowska 13. Julita Wojcik 13. Jadwiga Sawicka 14. Marta Deskur 15. Natalia LL 16. Anna Molska 17. Anna Konik 18. Aneta Grzeszykowska 19. Katarzyna Górna 20. Anna Niesterowicz 21. Agata Bogacka 22. Elzbieta Jablonska 23. Izabela Gustowska 24. Agata Michowska 25. Dorota Nieznalska 26. Agnieszka Kurant 27. Angelika Markul 28. Teresa Murak 29. Alicja Żebrowska 30. Malgorzata Markiewicz 31. Dorota Podlaska 32. Zorka Wollny 34. Karolina Zdunek 36. Basia Banda 37. Katarzyna Krakowiak 38. Malgorzta Szymankiewicz 39.Aleksandra Urban 40. Aleksandra Waliszewska … -

511 866 956 1854 1894 2138 2408 2618 2640 2718 2344 2371 2664 3060 3356 3433 3645 3834 4364 4737 4964 5015 5540 5833 6611 8457 8842 10047 12544 12682 13252 16450 17528 20810 22835 32146 34655 38372 -

]]> http://lokal30.pl/lokalna/?feed=rss2&p=2506 http://lokal30.pl/lokalna/?p=1306 http://lokal30.pl/lokalna/?p=1306#comments Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:42:40 +0000 lokal30 http://lokal30.pl/lokalna/?p=1306 lokal_30_ ZJ Invites ** at Polish Culture Institute

ZUZANNA JANIN _Majka z filmu _Kunstahalle wien ** at news.o.pl

ZUZANNA JANIN _MAJKA z filmu_-Kunstahalle_wien ** at bec.art.pl

ZUZANNA JANIN___MAJKA z fimu_KUNSTAHALLE wien **at wiadomosci.onet.pl

ANNA BAUMGART__interview with Teodor Ajder **at Krytyka Polityczna

STEFAN CONSTANTINESCU__From Venice to Renaissance Society **at Renaissance Society, Chicago

MALGORZATA SZYMANKIEWICZ__Recent Paintings at lokal_30 **at http://paulsartworld.blogspot.com/

lokal_30 _**at Newsweek LONDON

ZUZANNA JANIN__Federico Bianchi ** at exibart

STEFAN CONSTANTINESCU__Buchrest Biennale BB4  ** at MONOPOL

STEFAN CONSTANTINESCU__Bucharest Biennale BB4 _**at ART

ANNA BAUMGART & AGNIESZKA KURANT__Chinese Whispers **at OBIEG_PREZENTACJE

ZUZANNA JANIN__Obviously Cases of Madness Do Happen in Asylums This Isolated at ** at CULTURE.PL

lokal_30 at   ** at radiofranceinternational

lokal_30 at  ** at artnet

ZUZANNA JANIN__BEFORE or AFTER ** at eperimental cinema

ANNA BAUMGART__LUKASZ RONDUDA ** at marmurART

ZUZANNA JANIN__ALL THAT MUSIC! ** at OBIEG ROZMOWY

ZUZANNA JANIN__ALL THAT MUSIC! ** at INSPIRATION LONGUE

JAN MIODUSZEWSKI ** at OBIEG

JOZEF ROBAKOWSKI__lokal_30_warszawa_london ** at OBIEG

TOMASZ KOZAK__lokal_30_warszawa_london ** at culture.pl

BAUMGART, KURANT__Wielokropek ** at FRIEZE

ZUZANNA JANIN ** at culture.pl

ZUZANNA JANIN_FIGHT ** w blog Straszna Sztuka

ZUZANNA JANIN__SONSBEEK ** at FRIEZE

lokal_30_warszawa_london ** at THE ART NEWSPAPER

lokal_30_warszawa_london ** at Wyborcza

ANNA BAUMGART_Adrian David Gallery ** at flaneriaa.blox.pl

ZUZANNA JANIN__Majka from the Movie (Madness of Majka Skowron1975) ** at Glos Wielkopolski

ZUZANNA JANIN__ALL THAT MUSIC! ** at sztuka.pl

ZUZANNA JANIN__ALL THAT MUSIC! ** at culture.pl

ZUZANNA JANIN__ALL THAT MUSIC! ** at O.pl

FILIP BERENDT__Tranzyt ** at OBIEG by Karolina Kolenda

ZUZANNA JANIN__lokal_30_warszawa_london_project ** at OBIEG rozmowa z Mai Tran

JOZEF I IZA ROBAKOWSCY__Galeria Wymiany ** at OBIEG rozmowa z Marta Sklodowska

ZUZANNA JANIN & JAN SIMON__Power Games ** at /seconds

ANNA BAUMGART& AGNIESZKA KURANT__(…) Wielokropek ** at mojemiasto.org.pl

ANNA BAUMGART& AGNIESZKA KURANT__(…) Wielokropek  ** w Zycie Warszawy

ANNA BAUMGART& AGNIESZKA KURANT__(…)Wielokropek ** w Wyborczej

lokal_30_warszawa_london__Streets & Other Interiors ** rp.pl

ZDUNEK, BAUMGART, KURAK ** at kunstbeeld.nl

KAROL RADZISZEWSKI ** at Art&Buisness

lokal_30_warszawa_london__Sketches for A Project ** at ArtReview by Oliver Basciano

MARIOLA BRILLOWSKA_Poems for Films_lokal_30/Jadlodania Filozoficzna ** at You Tube

MARIOLA BRILLOWSKA ** at You Tube

ANNA BAUMGART ** at rp.pl

ANNA BAUMGART__HARTQUAKE at Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem  ** Babel Med

lokal_30 / RSA ** at Glasgow News

ANGELIKA FOJTUCH__/_(…) /Supermarket  ** at Artists Talking

TOMASZ KOZAK_/_DEMONS / Museum Bat Yam ** in HAARETZ

LOVE, CITY & CATASTROPHE_ lokal_30 / Nelly Aman Gallery ** in HAARETZ (PL_translation)

LETO, SIMON, JANIN, ZMIJEWSKI / Haifa Museum of Art ** in DZIENNINK (PL)

MARIOLA BRILLOWSKA lokal_30 NADA **  You Tube

JAN MIODUSZEWSKI / lokal_30 / NADA Miami  ** Miami Art Mania

MALGORZATA SZYMANKIEWICZ / lokal_30 WARSZAWA ** Artinfo.pl

JOZEF ROBAKOWSKI / Isntytut Polski w Berlinie  ** TV_net

ANNA BAUMGART / Zak Branicka / lokal_30  ** OBIEG

ZUZANNA JANIN, JAN SIMON / Haifa Museum of Art    ** FORWARD

lokal_30 on the list “100 the most important” in Poland ** OBIEG

ZUZANNA JANIN / Museum  of Art Haifa /Nelly Aman Gallery  ** HAARETZ (translationPL)

ZUZANNA JANIN / Brooklyn Museum of Art_ ** Brooklyn Musuem site

IGOR OMULECKI / lokal_30 Warszawa  ** Artinfo.pl

IGOR OMULECKI / lokal_30_WARSZAWA  ** DZIENNIK

MALGORZATA SZYMANKIEWICZ / Galeria Miejska_POZNAN_ ** Art&Buisness

video by

REGINA JOSE GALINDO

ANGELIKA MARKUL

ANNA MOLSKA

ELODIE PONG

JOZEF ROBAKOWSKI

KAMEN STOYANOV

MING WONG

W rozmowie z Janem Mioduszewskim wcześniej czy później musi paść pytanie w duchu Monty Pythona - Kiedy po raz pierwszy przebrał się Pan za drewno? Zadając to pytanie, trzeba wiedzieć, że zanim Mioduszewski wystąpił jako drewno, przebrał się za ścianę… ¹

***

Do Fabryki Mebli przyciąga mnie nade wszystko wrażenie, że w drewnianym biznes planie jej właściciela tkwi drzazga obłędu. Należy przy tym zaznaczyć, że jeżeli nawet działalność Fabryki jest szaleństwem, to fakt ten w żadnym razie nie podważa solidności zakładu. Przeciwnie, racjonalnej kalkulacji wymyka się właśnie rzetelność Fabryki, a także jej artystyczna bezinteresowność – Fabryka nie służy bowiem produkcji pragmatycznie użytecznej wiedzy, ani krytyce politycznej, czy wychowywaniu społeczeństwa. Fabryka wytwarza meble – a to już czysty obłęd.

Fabryka Mebli została założona w roku 2002 w warszawskiej Galerii 3A. Twórcą Fabryki jest malarz Jan Mioduszewski i w istocie Fabryka nie jest żadną Fabryką, tylko szczególną tożsamością Mioduszewskiego. Jako indywiduum, Mioduszewski może robić, co mu się podoba. Fabryka Mebli natomiast ma sprecyzowane cele – jak sama nazwa wskazuje, zakład wytwarza… Meble? Na to wygląda, ale odpowiedź na pytanie, co naprawdę produkuje Fabryka Mebli jest tyleż kluczowa, co nieoczywista. Formalnie rzecz biorąc, w Fabryce powstają obrazy mebli - przedstawienia szafek, komód, krzeseł, regałów i innych gratów - do złudzenia przypominające prawdziwe sprzęty, ale nie nadające się do praktycznego użytku. Trzeci wymiar mebli z Fabryki Mebli – wymiar umożliwiający na przykład siedzenie na krześle - jest optyczną iluzją.

Jako pracownik Fabryki Mebli Mioduszewski wciela się w rolę modernistycznego twórcy – robotnika sztuki; i rzeczywiście artysta jedną nogą tkwi w awangardzie, w artystycznych inżynieriach konstruktywizmu, w precyzyjnych geometriach swojego mistrza, Zbigniewa Gostomskiego. Druga noga malarza stoi jednak na innym gruncie; w sztuce dawnych mistrzów trompe l’oeil, wśród barokowych iluzjonistów i manierystycznych wirtuozów paradoksalnych wizualnych konceptów, w mitologicznym wymiarze malarstwa, pojmowanego jako złudzenie ostateczne, przedstawienie wymieniające się miejscami z rzeczywistością. To właśnie połączenie trzeźwego konstruktora z czarodziejem, czyni z Mioduszewskiego artystę zdolnego do tworzenia sztuki wyrafinowanej i intrygującej.

Fabryka Mebli trwa dość długo, aby zdać sobie sprawę, że nie chodzi tu o kaprys artysty, lecz o poważną decyzję. Mioduszewski nie udziela sobie urlopów z pracy w Fabryce Mebli, stając się artystą skrajnie wyspecjalizowanym, na wzór pracowników holenderskich fabryk malarskich XVII wieku, w których jeden twórca zajmował się tylko malowaniem pejzaży, inny martwych natur, jeszcze inny broni. Wbrew zaleceniom Michela Houellebecqa, który proponuje Poszerzenie pola walki, Mioduszewski je zawęża. W swoim samoograniczeniu przypomina patafizyków z literackiej grupy OULIPO, którzy narzucali sobie przy tworzeniu specyficzne przymusy i, jak Georges Perec, pisali powieść w formie lipogramu, w którym nie występuje litera „e”.² Mioduszewski postanawia obrazować wyłącznie za pomocą mebli. Na dodatek są to meble najzwyklejsze, przeważanie tania, gierkowsko-gomułkowska produkcja z płyty wiórowej w drewnopodobnej okleinie. Te meble bez właściwości są częścią estetycznego doświadczenia generacji, do której należy Mioduszewski, ale ważniejsze jest, że anonimowe, dają okazję do pracy na prostych geometriach i eliminują zbędne szczegóły, które odwracałyby uwagę widza od sedna sprawy.

Decyzja Mioduszewskiego jest ekstrawagancka, ale ograniczeniem jest tylko pozornie; w rzeczywistości otwiera pole nieograniczonych możliwości, jakie wiążą się z wykonywaniem subtelnych ruchów na małej przestrzeni. Praca w Fabryce Mebli to nie roboty przymusowe (na które skazał się w pewnym sensie Roman Opałka), lecz wyzwolenie: wybór mebla, rozstrzyga w punkcie wyjścia szereg malarskich dylematów (co malować, na jaki temat, itd.) i Mioduszewski może skupić się na tym co go interesuje, a interesować powinno także i nas, ponieważ mowa tu o sprawach tak zasadniczych jak poczucie rzeczywistości i napięcie między jej doświadczeniem a wyobrażeniem.

W 1670 roku niderlandzki mistrz trompe l’oeil Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, którego Mioduszewski bardzo sobie ceni, namalował iluzjonistyczny obraz przedstawiający rewers obrazu sztalugowego; deski blejtramu, płótno, namalowane tak, by widz nie mógł powstrzymać się od próby odwrócenia dzieła na “właściwą” stronę. Dowcip Gijsbrechtsa polegał na tym, że gdyby widz rzeczywiście tak uczynił, po “właściwej” stronie znalazłby stronę “nie właściwą”, a jednocześnie zobaczył by dokładnie to samo: rewers obrazu, deski blejtramu i płótno – tyle, że tym razem zobaczyłby je “naprawdę”. Ten “obraz-nic”, jak nazywa go Mioduszewski, ujawnia przedmiotowość dzieła sztuki ( 250 lat przed Duchampem!), ale może jeszcze dobitniej wykłada dialektykę prawdziwości i nieprawdziwości, w której syntezą jest obraz ze swoim dwuznacznym bytem. Tu wracamy do Mioduszewskiego; jego meble nie tylko należą do tradycji trompe l’oeil ale także do chętnie uprawianego w latach 60. XX shaped-canvas painting. Malując szafkę, Mioduszewski za pomocą hiperrealistycznej techniki, geometrii i światłocienia nie tylko kreuje iluzję trójwymiarowego kształtu, lecz wycina ów kształt z podobrazia, uzyskując przedmiotopodobne malowidło, gotowe do przemycenia z obszaru sztuki w dziedzinę rzeczywistości.

Zręczny kataloński twórca trompe l’oeil Borrell del Caso namalował w 1874 roku obraz Escapando de la crítica – Ucieczka krytyce. Uciekającym jest niesforny, bosy chłopiec, który zdaje się wyskakiwać poza fikcyjne ramy płótna, na którym został namalowany. Meble Mioduszewskiego z ram uciekły już dawno. Przebywając na wolności mieszają się z prawdziwymi meblami; Mioduszewski z upodobaniem zestawia na wystawach swoje obrazy w kształcie przedmiotów z przedmiotami, które zaczynamy podejrzewać, w tym kontekście – niesłusznie – o bycie obrazami. Meble na płaszczyźnie służą do iluzyjnego meblowania jak najbardziej realnych przestrzeni i spotykają się ze stworzonymi przez artystę obiektami hybrydami, takimi jak deska, której część jest prawdziwa, a część namalowana, bez rozpoznawalnej granicy między jedną częścią a drugą. W ten sposób zaciera się również granica między przedstawionym i przedstawianym. O tym, do czego może doprowadzić takie zacieranie, wiemy z co bardziej paranoicznych opowiadań Borgesa.

Jednym z paradoksów sztuki Mioduszewskiego jest jednoczesny ruch w dwóch kierunkach: ruch w stronę uprzedmiotowienia obrazu, a z drugiej strony dążenie do realizacji utopijnego celu, który zawsze przyświecał autorom trompe l’oeil, czyli ożywienia przedstawienia. Mioduszewski realizuje to dążenie osobiście wchodząc w rzeczywistość przedstawioną, przebrany za drewno. Rozważając ten paradoks, warto mieć w pamięci dychotomię drzewa i drewna – materiału, z którego wykonane są meble Fabryki Mebli. W wypadku drzewa i drewna odległość między materią ożywioną i nieożywioną jest znacznie krótsza, niż dystans dzielący żywe ciało i trupa. Martwe ciało jest trupem, martwe drzewo staje się drewnem, przedmiotem. W niezrównany sposób zobrazował to Andrzej Wróblewski w swoich Ukrzesłowieniach, obrazach przedstawiających ludzi, którzy zamiast w martwe ciała (zwłoki) zmieniają się w przedmioty nieożywione – krzesła. Kim więc staje się Jan Mioduszewski, kiedy przebiera się za drewno? Odziany w ręcznie malowany kostium maskujący, który upodobania go do drewnianej kłody, jest częścią swojego iluzjonistycznego malarstwa. Przebrany za drewno wykonuje, jak to nazywa, Nieruchomy Performance – zastyga pośród swoich prac, stapia się z nimi, wprowadza w obraz element życia, ale czyni to w sposób najbardziej paradoksalny, poprzez powolne wpadanie w kondycję przedmiotu.

Stach Szabłowski

1. Niniejszy tekst poświęcony jest Fabryce Mebli a Nieruchomy Performance Jana Mioduszewskiego: Ściana, 2×5H z 2003, odbył się poza jej działalnością; zainteresowanych akcją odsyłam do tekstu Grzegorza Borkowskiego: Testy iluzji, www.obieg.pl/recenzje/855

2. ten konkretny przymus Perec zrealizował w powieści La Disparition z 1969 roku

___

Jan Mioduszewski, ur. w 1974 roku w Warszawie. Studiował w PWSSP im. W. Strzemińskiego w Łodzi i w ASP w Warszawie, gdzie obecnie pracuje jako asystent prof. Jacka Dyrzyńskiego w Pracowni Wiedzy o Działaniach i Strukturach Wizualnych na Wydziale Malarstwa. Od 2002 roku wszystkie swoje realizacje (malarstwo, interwencje, fotografie, instalacje, działania w przestrzeni publicznej i performance) sygnuje FABRYKA MEBLI

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.

Najnowsza książka Piotra Bazylko i Krzysztofa Masiewicza “77 dzieł sztuki z historią. Opowiadania zebrane” to efekt kolekcjonowania historii, a nie obiektów sztuki. “77 dzieł sztuki z historią” jest książką zarówno dla tych, którzy dopiero zaczynają przygodę ze sztuką współczesną jak i tych, którzy chcieliby poznać unikalne historie zza kulis świata sztuki.

Gdzie i kiedy artystyczna niemoc dopadła Wilhelma Sasnala? Jak i dlaczego Zuzanna Janin przygotowywała się do walki z Przemysłwem Saletą? W jaki sposób Wojciech Fangor zarobił na swoje pierwsze mieszkanie? Który z klasyków polskiego malarstwa zatytułował jedną ze swoich prac “Gówno trąbi na zakręcie”? Przy okazji licytacji jakiej pracy poznali się autorzy tej książki Piotr Bazylko i Krzysztof Masiewicz?

Wśród autorów tekstów i omawianych prac są m.in.: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Paweł Althamer, Edward Dwurnik, Wojciech Fangor, Wojciech Fibak, Zuzanna Janin, Maciej Kurak, Jan Mioduszewski, Tadeusz Kantor, Józef Robakowski, Wilhelm Sasnal, Andrzej Starmach, Leon Tarasewicz, Andrzej Wróblewski, Jakub Julian Ziółowski.

W dyskusji podczas premiery ksiąźki udział wezmą: Piotr Bazylko (współautor książki), artysta Karol Radziszewski oraz krytyk Piotr Kosiewski.

Piotr Bazylko (1968) i Krzysztof Masiewicz (1969) - autorzy bloga poświęconego rynkowi sztuki współczesnej artbazaar.blogspot.com, oraz wydanego w 2008 roku przez FundacjÍ Bęc Zmiana oraz Korporację Ha!Art “Przewodnika kolekcjonera sztuki najnowszej”.

Karol Radziszewski (1980) - malarz, performer, publicysta. Założyciel, wydawca i naczelny magazynu DIK Fagazine. Mieszka i pracuje w Warszawie.

Piotr Kosiewski (1967) - historyk sztuki, krytyk. Stały współpracownik miesięcznika “Znak” i Kwartalnika Literackego “Kresy”. Współredaktor tomów zbiorowych m.in. “Historycy polscy i ukraińscy wobec problemów XX wieku” oraz “Wojny bałkańskie”.

P. Bazylko, K. Masiewicz: 77 dzieł sztuki z historią. Opowiadania zebrane
wydawca: 40 000 malarzy, Fundacja Bęc Zmiana
format: 11,7 x 16,5 cm, bogato ilustrowana
cena: 36 PLN

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=111595302189252

http://www.kronos.org.pl/

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.

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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

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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.

Stach Szabłowski

Was the girl by the name of Majka Skowron mad? To answer this question one needs to refer to a somewhat forgotten yet engrossing 1972 novel by Aleksander Minkowski.¹ In a nutshell, the adventure novel is a story of a rebellious teenager. The plot is set in a particular place and time: the Masurian Lake District at the height of the relatively short spell of communism in Poland. However, the scope of the story transcends the particulars of time and place. It is an archetypical narrative about the process of the growth of an individual, about initiation, self-recognition, confrontation with the Unknown which ultimately turns out to be one’s own self. Minkowski inscribed his narrative into the drama of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with clear allusions to the play. While we are in communist Poland of the 1970s, it is but a costume, a replaceable set decoration. Minkowski’s novel is one of those inspiring texts that open passages to other texts, other places and times.

In the collective imagination of my generation (those born in the 1970s) Szaleństwo Majki Skowron [Madness of Majka Skowron] functions not so much as a text, however, but an image, a memory of the TV series, directed by Stanisław Jędryka, based on Minkowski’s novel.² This was a production for young people. This target group should be treated very seriously. One of the characteristics of culture in communist Poland were works such as Szaleństwo Majki Skowron, precisely attuned to the sensitivity of the audience of the transition period, i.e. the youth, a social and existential group which is elusive and hard to define. This should be borne in mind since productions tailored to young people, inserted in between the offer for children and the adult culture, are nowadays few and far between. They have been replaced by a homogenous “family” entertainment. On the other hand, the entire contemporary mainstream of popular culture is in a sense youth-oriented and in general there is little else to choose from. In the context of the ubiquitous yet elusive category of contemporary youth, the teenager Majka Skowron and her alleged madness stand out all the more conspicuously.

This character, deposited in the archive of collective memory, is once again set in motion, this time in the field of art, as the key figure of Zuzanna Janin’s project titled Majka From the Movie.³

What kind of project is it? To capture its essence one needs to open up to the transgressive and paradoxical nature of contemporary art, its mobile and ontologically flickering nature, the ability to be a few things at a time and to function simultaneously on a number of parallel levels. At its basic level, the Majka From the Movie project is a series of videos whose structure resembles that of a television series. Like episodes of a single soap opera, all the works have the same trailer and an identical ending, with autonomous episodes taking place in between. From this starting point and from the idea of shooting an “art” series that resembles the format of TV productions, Janin’s project develops into a multidimensional enterprise. Combining the discourse of collective and individual memory, it is an attempt at telling a story from the point of view of an individual, a reflection on the entanglement of fiction and reality in contemporary culture. Last but not least, it provokes reflection on the indelible mark stamped by cinematography and popular culture on our image of the world and of ourselves.

A television series which reconciles fragmentariness and continuity of narration seems the most appropriate form of accounting for contemporary experience. It is the most fitting form since it comes closest to the way we perceive reality, itself falling into sequences of episodes and ever open, always to be continued, in line with the phrase to be continued… that concludes each part of Zuzanna Janin’s project.

The Majka From the Movie project is not only about the potential inherent in the very formula of a series, however, but about a particular series titled Szaleństwo Majki Skowron. Each episode starts off with a trailer borrowed from Stanisław Jędryka’s TV production of 1976. While Zuzanna Janin’s work contains elements of a remake, sequel or even apocrypha of Szaleństwo Majki Skowron, the project is better described as a contemporary palimpsest of a historical visual text. This new narration is superimposed on another, already existing one. The first work (the 1976 series) still shows through the new one (i.e. the present-day video project); both “texts”, the old and the contemporary one, merge and make up a totally unique quality.

At this point we come to the key point of the entire undertaking, i.e. the unique construction of the identity of its protagonist, the “mad” Majka Skowron. In the 1976 series the part was played by the teenage Zuzanna Antoszkiewicz, currently known as Zuzanna Janin. The artist performs a daring symbolic operation – using her younger self as a means to “enters” the reality of the movie, she emerges on the other side of the looking-glass that cinematography puts up to reality. Once there, the author gains a nearly unlimited and “magic” power over the represented world. No wonder Minkowski’s text draws on The Tempest, in which Prospero, through his magic, freely shapes the reality of the Island, creating mirages, illusions and manipulating the shipwrecked protagonists who roam his world. In Shakespeare, Prospero calls his magic “Art”. Indeed, he is the figure of the artist, or author, who appears in his own text.

Zuzanna Janin make use of her “magic” powers on the Island, which in her particular case is a TV series from the past, by liberating her protagonist from the constrictions of time and space. In Jędryka’s production the hero is immersed in the reality of a movie like a fly in amber. She remains a teenager throughout, always in the Masurian Lakeland, and the 1970s last forever. In turn, Janin allows Majka to grow up, to visit other places and touch other moments of History; she is free to experience “all the rest”. Majka is liberated through the technique of found footage; Janin’s palimpsest is woven out of quotations from the history of world cinema as well as of contemporary films made by the artist herself, where Majka is played by Mel Baranowska, Zuzanna Janin’s daughter. In this way the identity of the protagonist expands and transcends that of the individual. Majka is an icon of Poland’s youth culture under communism, an archetypical rebellious teenager, and she is Zuzanna Janin’s past and her future, as personified by her daughter, a woman in her early twenties. She is also Janin herself as an author within her own work.⁴ This is, however, not the end of the metamorphoses of Majka Skowron, a character straddling reality and cinematographic fiction. Thanks to the “edition of attractions” that working with found footage enables, Majka leaves the Masurian lakes and sets out on a trip through movie images, donning ever new masks and playing many parts. She is Daria, the hippie from Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, who in a gesture of generational, anti-establishment rebellion blows up the house of her father, a famous architect. She travels along Lynch’s Lost Highway, dances with Tarantino’s postmodern protagonists and with Marlon Brando in The Last Tango in Paris. Through Polish movies of “moral unrest” she observes the erosion of the communist system in Eastern Europe, only to find herself in the “heart of darkness” of war-ravaged Vietnam depicted in Apocalypse Now, in present-day Japan, and even within a cartoon whose heroes fight a never-ending battle with some ultimate cosmic evil. In one of the episodes of Zuzanna Janin’s series Majka, played this time by Mel Baranowska, meets Slavoj Žižek at the Central Railway Station in Warsaw. The protagonist tells the famous philosopher, incidentally known for his fascination with the cinema, that she is on a journey through culture and asks for some signposts. Žižek advises Majka not to seek her heroes in culture, not to find inspiration and role models in people but in their actions. Indeed, in the Majka From the Movie project the protagonist plunges headlong into a whirl of activities, events, plots, and cinematographic action.

The narration of Majka From the Movie as a transgressive movie of the road (weaving between different culture texts) begins around the year 1968, at a time of cultural revolution, of a breakthrough that was in large measure the cornerstone of contemporary reality. One of the motifs in the narrative of the Majka From the Movie project is the process of transferring Polish experience of postmodernity onto an international level. 1968 was a symbolic year in Poland as well. Its protagonists, students and young people who felt the need for change, were much like their peers in Paris or New York. Still, the significance of the events was far from identical and their contexts were markedly divergent. Majka From the Movie interestingly presents the parallel experience of the young generation in Poland and in the world; until 1989 this experience developed separately, on two sides of the iron curtain, notwithstanding all the convergences. This can be seen in the soundtrack of Majka From the Movie, where Marek Grechuta meets Pink Floyd, and Mira Kubasińska plays back to back with The Doors. The terms of “revolution” or “communism” meant different things in rebellious Paris that it did in Warsaw (or in the Masurian Lakeland) under communism, where leftist rhetoric had been appropriated by the totalitarian regime. Still, both here and there we were watching the same films and it is no coincidence that Janin inscribes Majka into the context of world culture precisely with the help of pop music and cinema. We watch films – but in some way films tell a story about us, as they tell a story about Majka Skowron, a figure who is both the protagonist and the narrator, viewer and image, a fictitious creation and a real person. In this context the question about the madness of Majka Skowron becomes purely rhetorical; without a doubt Majka is mad and her madness is the madness of the world.

Stach Szabłowski,

Warsaw, JANUARY 2010

^1. Aleksander Minkowski, Szaleństwo Majki Skowron, Wydawnictwo Harcerskie Horyzonty, Warszawa, 1972.

^2. Szaleństwo Majki Skowron, a 9-episode television series, director: Stanisław Jędryka, screenplay: Aleksander Minkowski on the basis of his own novel, production: TVP, 1976.

^3. Tomasz Kozak was the artist’s guest collaborator during the project. The artist made a work Shelter-Skelter that might be defined as a pilot or a trailer of the video project made by Zuzanna Janin as a series.

⁴. . It is worth pointing out that the element of a multi-generational identity transcending that of the individual appeared in Zuzanna Janin’s art before. In a series of photographic installations from the 1990s, “Follow Me, Change Me, It’s Time”, the artist superimposed laminated photos showing fragments of bodies (hands, legs, bellies) of the herself and the women of her family: her grandmother, sister and daughter. The layers of superimposed pictures made up sequences developing in space and time. Time frozen in an image extended onto generations of women related to the artist both emotionally and genetically.

The term originates in Sergey Eisenstein’s theory of the cinema.

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.

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

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

nieformalne dyskusje czesci OFSW przedluzaly sie po zebraniu ***unformal discusions of part of CFoVA continue after meeting
on 01.12 2009

Dominik Kurylek, Barbara Piwowarska, Robert Rumas, Jaroslaw Suchan, Zbigniew Libera, Marta Deskur, Zuzanna Janin, Michal Suchora, Oskar Dawicki i Igor Krenz…byl, ale nie widac na obrazku

Anna Baumgart & Agnieszka Kurant, (…) 2009

Instalacja nad miejscem kladki na Chlodnej laczacej Male i Duze Getto w Warszawie w latach 1942-1943

Konceptualna praca Anny Baumgart i Agnieszki Kurant, którą autorki traktują jako swoistą “rzeźbę językową”, podejmuje temat pamięci i upamiętniania. Dodatkowo bada granice współczesnej tożsamości Warszawy, dla której podstawowymi kategoriami opisu są pustka i nieobecność. II wojna światowa, w której zginęła jedna trzecia mieszkańców i prawie cała społeczność żydowska, położyła kres wielokulturowości miasta. Z pejzażu Warszawy zniknęła na zawsze architektura synagog, a z ulic dźwięk języka jidysz.

(…) - efemeryczna i zrywająca z prawem grawitacji rzeźba przybierająca formę gigantycznego znaku interpunkcyjnego zostanie zainstalowana w miejscu symbolicznym - nad ulicą Chłodną. Tamtędy w czasie II wojny światowej przebiegała “kładka”, drewniany most nad aryjską częścią miasta, łączący Duże i Małe Getto. W ten sposób autorki chcą przełamać tabu, jakim do dziś jest, rzucająca cień na polsko-żydowskie relacje, świadomość Polaków, że to na ich oczach dokonała się zagłada Żydów.

(…) to znak interpunkcyjny oznaczający: opuszczenie, pominięcie w tekście, przerwanie myśli, brakujący element. W zamyśle autorek projekt przekracza ramy historii i interpunkcji. (…) jest instalacją podróżującą, znakiem do wynajęcia, pustym miejscem skupiającym uwagę na istniejących w pamięci i kulturze tabu. W lustrzanej powierzchni balonów odbija się każdy zbliżający się element lub dyskurs. (…) może się pojawić wszędzie tam, gdzie istnieją nierozwiązane problemy i trudne do wypowiedzenia tematy.

Traktujemy projekt jak katalizator różnych, często wykluczających się znaczeń – komentują swój projekt autorki. Dla nas sztuka, w odróżnieniu od dydaktyki i polityki nie jest tubą czy prezentacją z góry zastanych poglądów. Chciałybyśmy, aby (…) uruchomił nowe, nieprzewidywalne sytuacje społeczne, a w nasyconej traumatyczną przeszłością i stabuizowanej przestrzeni Warszawy poruszył to, co zepchnięte do kolektywnej podświadomości.

Projektowi towarzyszy cykl debat publicznych na temat strategii pamięci i upamiętniania, estetyki glamour jako wehikułu artykulacji tematów tabu, sztuki konceptualnej, historii i ironii. Mamy nadzieję, że dzięki uruchomionej w ten sposób dyskusji nieodstępny dotąd, zagrzebany w niepamięci i niewypowiedziany fragment wspólnego doświadczenia Żydów i Polaków odzyska dostęp do języka, a wraz z nim kontakt ze współczesnością.

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

JAN MIODUSZEWSKI / FABRYKA MEBLI

NAUKA / EDUKACJA

Malarstwo, obiekt, instalacja

Galeria Oranżeria, Centrum Rzeźby Polskiej w Orońsku

wernisaż: 21 listopada 2009 r. godz. 14

wystawa czynna do 31 grudnia 2009 r.

wystawę zrealizowano przy pomocy finansowej MKiDN

Centrum Rzeźby Polskiej

ul. Topolowa 1,26-505 Orońsko

www.rzezba-oronsko.pl

www.sculpture.art.pl

Tematem wystawy Nauka/Edukacja jest sztuka i wiedza. Jan Mioduszewski buduje wypowiedź o sposobach tworzenia wiedzy w sztuce i sposobach tworzenia wiedzy o sztuce. Interesują go metody dystrybucji wiedzy zdobytej przez artystów i teoretyków poprzez system edukacji. W swojej instalacji Mioduszewski rozgrywa w sposób wizualny konflikt pomiędzy konceptualizacją po którą sięga artysta w swojej pracy z materiałem a konceptualizacją jego pracy, która dokonuje się poprzez wyrażanie jej słowem.

Na wystawie w Galerii Oranżeria w CRP zaprezentowane są dwie instalacje: KLASA oraz PRACOWNIA. W prawym skrzydle galerii artysta umieścił PRACOWNIĘ. Ma to szczególne znaczenie w kontekście miejsca prezentacji. W Oranżerii Józef Brandt, XIX w polski malarz i właściciel Orońska urządził letnią pracownię malarską. Jan Mioduszewski przywraca na chwilę aurę tego miejsca ale zamiast modelki stawia szafę a na sztaludze jej malarski wizerunek. Każdy z widzów może spojrzeniem objąć modelkę i reprezentację, powtarzając spojrzenie malarza. W tej części wystawy dominuje bezpośredniość doświadczenia, niewolna od szeregu dogmatów jakimi są zasady sztuki. Szafy namalowane i realna tkwią pomiędzy imitatio a inventio.

W lewym skrzydle prezentowana jest KLASA. Ta część realizacji odtwarza ideę KLASY poprzez układ 12 stołów w dwóch rzędach. Na czarnych i białych blatach stołów stoją przestrzenne napisy. Każdy stół poświęcony jest innemu hasłu – pojęciu. Wybrane pojęcia dotyczą sztuki, poszukiwania tożsamości, rzeczywistości artystycznej, estetyki. Instalacja KLASA mówi zarówno o niepokojach ucznia, o lękach i ciemnościach w jakich kształtuje się osobowość jak i o blaskach i cieniach kariery artystycznej. W tej części umieszczone są również modne pojęcia używane przez krytykę artystyczną oraz pojęcia odnoszące się do kuszących i popularnych strategii artystycznych. Wyimaginowany uczeń abstrakcyjnej KLASY konfrontuje się z hasłami – pojęciami takimi jak: TABU, TRAUMA, DEATH, ILUSSIO, NOIA ( NUDA), ART MARKET, SKANDAL, GRA, POLITYKA, NEURASTENIA, NARCISISMO. Na jednym ze stołów Jan Mioduszewski umieścił cytat z wiersza Cypriana Kamila Norwida „Sława”.

Dreaming of Speed & Adventure                                       ALL THAT MUSIC!

ALL THAT MUSIC!                                                               Silence (24h)

Spider. Mushroom. Boy.                                                          Dreaming Boy

MAJKA from the Movie (Madness of Majka Skowron 1975) /
MAJKA z filmu  (Szalenstwo Majki Skowron 1975), 2009, DVD, each ca. 12-30 min
6 first episodes by Zuzanna Janin and trailer by Tomasz Kozak

to be continued…

photos A.R.

do Ministra Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego RP

Warszawa, 10 listopada 2009

Pan Bogdan Zdrojewski
Minister Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego RP
ul. Krakowskie Przedmieście 15/17
00-071 Warszawa

Szanowny Panie Ministrze,

Jako Kolegium Kuratorów Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski w Warszawie zwracamy się do Pana w związku
z zapowiedzianą zmianą na stanowisku jego dyrektora. Będąc współautorami programu merytorycznego tej placówki
poprzez wiele projektów z zakresu sztuk wizualnych, teatru, kina, muzyki i edukacji, mamy nadzieję na kontynuację ambitnych założeń i niezakłócony rozwój tego wyjątkowego w historii sztuki najnowszej miejsca, tak istotnego na aktualnej artystycznej mapie Polski.
Postulujemy wybór nowego dyrektora CSW na drodze otwartego międzynarodowego konkursu, precyzującego m.in. długość kadencji na tym stanowisku, jak to ma miejsce w wielu prestiżowych instytucjach sztuki w Europie. Procedura ta zapewni
nie tylko szansę na udział wielu kandydatów z Polski i zagranicy, ale też potwierdzi oraz wzmocni demokratyczne mechanizmy
i procesy systemu zarządzania kulturą w naszym kraju. Dyskusja, którą zainicjował tegoroczny Kongres Kultury Polskiej, wskazuje na gotowość środowisk artystycznych do dialogu i debaty oraz potrzebę kreowania nowych modeli działania
i podnoszenia standardów pracy w kulturze, przy zwiększaniu transparentności procesów decyzyjnych, czego efektem
byłby bardziej otwarty i demokratyczny model kultury.

CSW Zamek Ujazdowski obchodzi właśnie dwudziestolecie istnienia i ma już swoją historię. Jedną z najważniejszych cech
tej instytucji od początku działalności było nastawienie na prezentację najbardziej aktualnych zjawisk, otwieranie przestrzeni
dla artystycznego eksperymentu i nowych idei przy jednoczesnym tworzeniu refleksji teoretycznej oraz propagowaniu sztuki współczesnej. Ponowna inauguracja działania Laboratorium jako Międzynarodowego Centrum Wymiany Artystycznej stwarza nowy potencjał dla prezentowania najciekawszych zjawisk sztuki współczesnej w szerokim, interdyscyplinarnym spektrum.
Tym bardziej wybór godnego następcy rzeczywistego twórcy tego miejsca, Wojciecha Krukowskiego, wydaje się sprawą kluczową. CSW potrzebuje osoby, której całościowa wizja przyszłości instytucji, wiedza, kompetencje, międzynarodowe kontakty, zdolności menedżerskie, oraz energia i entuzjazm pomogą wyznaczyć nowy, równie istotny etap historii.

Jednocześnie postulujemy udział przedstawicieli Kolegium Kuratorów oraz Rady CSW w procedurze wyboru
nowego dyrektora CSW Zamek Ujazdowski.

Mamy nadzieję, że głos ten zostanie odczytany jako chęć żywego uczestniczenia nie tylko w debacie o przyszłości
naszej instytucji, ale także szerszej dyskusji o kształtowaniu środowiska i warunków dla tworzenia,
prezentowania i zachowywania sztuki i kultury w Polsce.

Z wyrazami szacunku,

Kolegium Kuratorów CSW

Grzegorz Borkowski, kurator Programu Publikacji oraz redaktor magazynu „Obieg”

Janusz Byszewski, kurator Programu Laboratorium Edukacji Twórczej

Marianna Dobkowska, kurator a-i-r laboratory

Ewa Gorządek, główny kurator Programu Wystaw Polskich

Marek Goździewski, kurator Programu Wystaw i Programu Edukacji

Marek Grygiel, kurator Programu Fotografii

Janusz Marek, kurator Programu Teatru i Performance

Adam Mazur, kurator i redaktor naczelny magazynu „Obieg”

Maria Parczewska, kurator Programu Laboratorium Edukacji Twórczej

Kaja Pawełek, kurator

Paweł Polit, kurator Programu Audytorium

Łukasz Ronduda, kurator Archiwum Polskiego Filmu Eksperymentalnego

Ika Sienkiewicz-Nowacka, główny kurator a-i-r laboratory

Milada Ślizińska, główny kurator Programu Wystaw Międzynarodowych

Urszula Śniegowska, kurator programu KINO.LAB

Stach Szabłowski, kurator Programu Wystaw Polskich

Justyna Wesołowska, asystent kuratora Programu Wystaw Międzynarodowych

Krzysztof Wojciechowski, kurator Programu Fotografii

Andrzej Załęski, kurator Programu Strefa ]]> http://lokal30.pl/lokalna/?feed=rss2&p=1963 http://lokal30.pl/lokalna/?p=2043 http://lokal30.pl/lokalna/?p=2043#comments Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:33:14 +0000 lokal30 http://lokal30.pl/lokalna/?p=2043 Jozef Robakowski, Anna Baumgart, Anna Janczyszyn_Jaros

wadeson street late eening & last guests just before midnight…

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

Agnieszka Rayzacher o video artystow lokalu_30: We Would Like You To Know That We Are Not Them
Agnieszka Okrzeja o Malgorzacie Szymankiewicz
Michal Suchora  o Malgorzacie Szymankiewicz
Michal Suchora o Macieju Kuraku,
Michal Suchora o Pierre Poggi (I),
Roman Lewandowski o Marioli Brillowskiej,
Michal Suchora o Filipie Berendcie,
Agnieszka Rayzacher o Karolinie Zdunek,
Lukasz Ronduda o Józefie Robakowskim,
Agnieszka Rayzacher o Piotrze Wysockim,
Michal Suchora o Hybrydach i innych Teleportacjach,
Agnieszka Rayzacher o Skin&Bones,

prezentacja video artystow lokalu_30:

Anna Baumgart
Zuzanna Janin
Tomasz Kozak
Norman Leto
Elodie Pong
Karol Radziszewski
Jozef Robakowski
Jasmina Wojcik

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

Stworzenie wystawy prac wideo według klucza umiejscowienia wizerunku autora lub jego komentarza w samym dziele, zdaje się mieć szczególny wydźwięk. Dzieło sztuki staje się tu bowiem nośnikiem niezwykłego spotkania: pozwala na niemal bezpośredni kontakt z artystą.

W wystawie We Would Like You To Know That We Are Not Them artyści pokazują świat z bardzo odmiennej perspektywy: przyjmują role aktora, narratora, komentataora lub kolekcjonera obrazów rzeczywistości, ktorej są świadkami razem z nami. Pozwalają nam tzatem w stoworzonych lub zarejestrowanych przez siebie sytuacjach / obrazach odnależć samych siebie.

Większość współczesnych widzów utożsamia artystę z jego dziełem, historia zaś pokazuje, jak bardzo pozycja artysty ewoluowała. W rzeczywistości współczesny artysta przyjmuje wiele ról, mających niewiele wspólnego z wizerunkiem np. romantycznego twórcy szarpanego przypływami natchnienia. To m.in.: rola krytyka społeczeństwa, a także swoistego ogniwa łączącego filozofię, antropologię, a nawet nauki ścisłe z materią świata. Artysta coraz częściej przyjmuje funkcję menadżera zarządzającego produkcją. Z tą postawą wiąże się też fakt zarzucenia mistrzostwa w sztuce, w której obszarze coraz częściej znajdują się proste, amatorskie zdjęcia czy domowym sumptem wykonywane filmy wideo. Prosta foma i dokument wygrywają tu z kreacyjnością i sztucznością filmowego rzemiosła.

Wydaje się, że jedną z istotniejszych strategii stosowanych w sztuce współczesnej jest strategia wcielania się – odgrywania ról będących swoistym symulakrem funkcjonowania w rzeczywistości. Efektem stosowania tej strategii są dzieła o wielkiej sile autentyzmu i szczerości przekazu,
niezwykle zdyscyplinowane w swojej prostocie w porównaniu do innych dziedzin sztuki, których twórcy dążą do zaskoczenia czy oczarowania widza. Tu artysta nie „czaruje” i nie kokietuje. Wiela się w zastaną sytuację i swoją postacią podbija jej znaczenia.

Obserwujemy tu też zjawisko potrzeby przeżycia świata danego nam do oglądu: jakby artyście nie wystarczało już samo „bycie artystą” i niejasny status twórcy starał się rekompensować poprzez konkret bycia innym – bokserką, kolekcjonerem sekterów czy romantyczną heroiną z czarno-białego filmu.

W tym kontekście, szczególnie interesujące są prace artystów przyjmujących strategię „stawania się” aktorem w isniejącym już filmie. W niemal dosłowny sposób dokonała tego Anna Baumgart, która w pracy Prawdziwe? (2001), poprzez zastosowanie strategii found footage stała się bohaterką słynnego rosyjskiego filmu Michaiła Kałatozowa Lecą żurawie z 1957 roku. Walter Benjamin w Twórcy jako wytwórcy pisał o filmie: Jego iluzyjność to iluzyjność drugiego stopnia – rezultat montażu . Artystka wykorzystując możliwości, jakie daje technika filmowa wmontowała własną twarz w miejsce twarzy aktorki. Trwające niecałe 3 minuty wideo przedstawia scenę dramatycznej kłótni dwojga kochanków. Ich miłość jest niemożliwa – on kocha narzeczoną własnego, walczącego na froncie brata. Ona, Wiera, broni się przed uczuciem wykrzykując niet, niet, niet. Czyż nie jest to szczyt dziewczęcych marzeń o byciu uwielbianą i pożądaną przez mężczyzn? Ale wmontowanie własnej twarzy do wielkiej produkcji filmowej, to również spełnienie snu o sławie, wielkiej urodzie, wzbudzaniu podziwu. Baumgart poddaje krytycznej analizie wpływ mediów na naszą wyobraźnię. To dzięki niej i funkcjonującym w niej schematom, możemy, choć na chwilę uciec od rzeczywistości stając się romantyczną kochanką i gwiazdą ekranu.

Sen o byciu kimś innym realizuje też Zuzanna Janin. Jej praca Walka/I LoveYouToo (2001) to zapis walki artystki z zawodowym bokserem wagi ciężkiej. Etap kontaktu ze sportowcem i przekonania go do projektu był jednym z istotnych elementów pracy. Kolejny to wielomiesięczne treningi, jakim artystka poddała się, chcąc sprostać walce z zawodowym bokserem i „stać się bokserką”. Dyskurs przeciwieństw nie jest jedyną z możliwych interpretacji tej pracy, która jawi się również, jako metafora codziennego zmagania się z sobą samym, z rzeczywistością, wreszcie mierzenia się samego artysty z medialnym i społecznym odbiorem. W Walce Zuzanna Janin sytuuje siebie, jako bohaterkę rozgrywanej sytuacji, wcielając się w rolę „artystki medialnej”, która nie obawia się konfrontacji z szeroką widownią i wcielenia się w rolę wymagającą niezwykłego poświęcenia i uporu. Artystka umieszcze swoją pracę w zbudowanej przez siebie instalacji – jej elementem jest olbrzymia zasłona, będąca jednocześnie ekranem, na którym rozgrywa się akcja Walki.

Trochę innemu wyzwaniu musiał sprostać Karol Radziszewski, młody artysta, a zarazem twórca, wydawca i redaktor naczelny gejowskiego art zinu DIK Fagazine. Do udziału w swoich projektach zaprasza swoją rodzinę, pracując tym samym na swój podwójny wizerunek – młodego artysty decydującego się na coming out i podążającego tym tropem w swoich działaniach oraz kochającego syna i wnuka, kierującego myśli ku najbliższym, gdy tylko nadarza się okazja. Bohaterką jego prac staje się między innymi babcia – zawsze gotowa wesprzeć wnuka. W wideo Chwalcie łąki umajone (2007) Radziszewski wciela się w wokalistę i wraz z babcią nagrywa teledysk do tradycyjnej pieśni kościelnej. Spotkanie wywrotowego młodzińca z bogobojną, tradycyjną starszą panią, to nie tylko gra przeciwieństw, ale także krytyczne spojrzenie na rolę tradycji, bezrefleksyjnego przejmowania dewocyjnych wzorców, uciążliwego dla kultury bagażu narzucanych przez releligijne wychowanie ograniczeń. Radziszewski nie po raz pierwszy buduje sytuację nieoczywistości związanej z naturą relacji, jakie łączą go z bohaterami jego prac.

Tylko pozornie mniej złożona wydaje się natura interakcji, w jakie wchodzą z bohaterami swoich prac dwie artystki – Szwajcarka amerykańskiego pochodzenia, Elodie Pong i pochodząca z Warszawy Jaśmina Wójcik. Obydwie przyjęły w swoich projektach pozycję rozmówczyń / rejestratorek, starających się nadać kierunek i zapanować nad przebiegiem rozmów i wypowiedzi zapisanych w ich para-dokumentalnych pracach wideo. Oglądając prace Pong i Wójcik nie sposób nie zadać pytania, o to, jak dalece artystki wcieliły się w swoje role i czy rozmowa nie nabrała charakteru swoistej terapii? A jeśli tak, to dla kogo? Jaśmina Wójcik w filmie Samsara (2008) usiłuje przeniknąć do świata samotnej, starszej kobiety, prostymi pytaniami prowokując wypowiedzi ujawniające zamknięcie w skorupie banalnych czynności, drobnych wydarzeń oraz wspomnień. Mimo szczerych chęci młoda artystka nie jest w stanie pomóc swojej rozmówczyni, zatapiającej się w społecznej i rodzinnej izolacji, obsesyjnie poszukującej wazonu lub pieniędzy rzekomo schowanych przez « niego » wyimaginowanego w głowie samotnej kobiety złośliwca, który uprzykrza jej ostanie chwile życia. Film kończy przejmujące wyznanie kobiety: “There is no way. And I’m constantly in this state of despair. I’m worthless now”. W bardziej wieloznacznej roli niż Jaśmina Wójcik występuje Elodie Pong autorka wideo Secrets for Sale (2005), która swoich rozmówców zaprosiła do wieloetapowego « systemu » uczestniczenia w jej pracy, na który składają się: przybycie do studia, podjęcie decyzji o sprzedaniu swojego sekretu, podpisanie kontraktu, opowiedzenie sekretu przed kamerą, a następnie odsprzedanie go artystce – producentce – interlokutorce, za proponowaną przez nią kwotę. W ten sposób Pong stworzyła niezwykłą kolekcję 300 sekretów – od banalnych, takich jak marzenie o kupnie kanapy ze skóry słonia, po dramatyczne, związane z byciem molestowanym w okresie dzieciństwa. Artystka nie wchodzi w bliższe relacje z osobami deponującymi u niej swoje tajemnice – zachowuje profesjonalny dystans starając się dopełnić wszystkich formalności, tak, aby uruchomiona przez nią machina działała bez zarzutu.

Z innej pozycji występują artyści w swoich pracach decydujący się na przyjęcie roli narratora. Głos artysty komentującego kolejne kadry jest elementem zbliżającym wideo do filmowego dokumentu, z tą różnicą, że w obszarze sztuki nie mamy pewności czy to, co oglądamy jest fikcją, zapisem rzeczywistości, czy może zapisem spreparowanej rzeczywistości. Józef Robakowski w latach 1978-1999 filmował widok z okna swojej kuchni. From My Window (1978-1999), z pozoru beznamiętny zapis, opatrzony odautorskim komentarzem stał się jedną z bardziej autentycznych i poruszających narracji dotyczących przemian, jakie nastąpiły w Polsce w ciągu 20 dokumentowanych przez autora lat. Robakowski przy użyciu zwykłej kamery przekłada prywatne na publiczne pokazując, jak bardzo mylimy się uważając, że historia i polityka nie mają wpływu na naszą codzienność, na nas samych. Według Deborda: Historia ukazuje się więc ludziom jako coś zewnętrznego, sprzecznego z ich zamiarami, czynnik zewnętrzny, przed którym pragnęli się uchronić.  Być może, kiedy bierzemy udział w jakimś wydarzeniu, manifestacji, czy kiedy wykonujemy banalną czynność, nie jesteśmy w stanie ocenić ich wymiaru, ale to właśnie artysta dzięki swojemu spojrzeniu „przez oko kamery” zyskuje właściwy dystans, który upoważnia go do wystąpienia z pozycji tego, który opowiada. Jak pisał Walter Benjamin: […] przedstawienie rzeczywistości w filmie ma dla dzisiejszego człowieka nieporównanie większą wagę, ponieważ właśnie dzięki temu dogłębnemu przeniknięciu aparaturą oddaje pozatechniczny aspekt rzeczywistości, jak od dzieła sztuki odbiorca ma prawo wymagać.

Tomasz Kozak – artysta wideo, malarz i wykładowca akademicki, w swojej Lekcji Jogi (2007) występuje z pozycji artysty-narratora, artysty-erudyty. Wideo to, jak większość prac Kozaka, zostało zrealizowane metodą found footage. Artysta zestawia tu sceny klasycznego kina rozrywkowego z dokumentem przyrodniczym i filmami porno. Znakomicie wyselekcjonowane i zmontowane kadry Kozak ilustruje muzyką i czytanym przez siebie komentarzem będącym adaptacją tekstów młodopolskiego pisarza Tadeusza Micińskiego. Jego dość kontrowersyjną ideę „Polski Indyjskiej”, artysta, również autor wykładów i esejów dotyczących własnych prac, komentuje w następujący sposób:  Mitologia aryjska - niezwykle popularna w dziewiętnastym stuleciu - została antropologicznie podważona i politycznie oraz moralnie skompromitowana w wieku dwudziestym. Tymczasem dziś - na początku nowego milenium - anachronizm tej mitologii okazuje się pozorny, skoro jej dyskurs można niemal dosłownie zilustrować cytatami z takich superprodukcji jak Harry Potter, czy Władca pierścieni. W tym kontekście konkluzja Lekcji... jest nader niepokojąca - prowokuje bowiem podejrzenie, że współczesna kultura zapomniała o najbardziej tragicznych momentach nowoczesnej historii, lub co gorsza - pamięta wprawdzie o nich, lecz beztrosko używa tej pamięci, by bawić się fantazmatami odpowiedzialnymi za historyczne katastrofy.

Rolę narratora i przewodnika po stworzonej przez siebie cyfrowej rzeczywistości przyjmuje również Norman Leto. Jego półgodzinne wideo Buttes Monteaux (2009) wraz z czytanym przez autora komentarzem stanowi część powstającego filmu pełnometrażowego oraz autorskiej książki artystycznej. Artysta przyznaje się do zmęczenia rzeczywistością, konkretem i namacalnością. Wizualizacje przestrzeni 3D, po których prowadzi nas Leto, sprawiają wrażenie istniejących w „realu”. To nie jest surrealny świat gry komputerowej, z jego naiwną, kiczowatą estetyką i narracją, ale swoista minimalistyczna dokumentacja cyfrowego środowiska, w którym „żyją” niewielcy delegaci – zaprogramowane przez Leto byty o sztucznej inteligencji, poruszające się własnymi trasami. Czy zatem nie jest to procesja symulakrów oraz model rzeczywistości pozbawionej źródła i realności: hiperrzeczywistości , które już w 1981 roku przywoływał Baudrillard? Artysta odżegnuje się od traktowania jego prac, jako animacji i choć sam przyznaje, że do „filmowania” tworzonych przez siebie przestrzeni nie potrzebuje kamery, pozycjonuje się w szeroko pojętym obszarze sztuki wideo i nowych mediów.

Za kolebkę polskiej sztuki wideo uważa się działający w Łodzi w latach 1970-77, założony m.in. przez Józefa Robakowskiego Warsztat Formy Filmowej. Grupa ta skupiała się przed wszystkim na analitycznym traktowaniu medium, ekseprymentach formalnych, poszukiwaniach oraz na wcielaniu osiągnięć techniki filmowej w obszar sztuki współczesnej. Z kolei w latach 90., wraz z osiągnięciami artystów z obszaru sztuki krytycznej, wideo zaisniało na polskiej scenie artystycznej jako działanie o szerszym zakresie oddziaływania. Dziś zdobywa tu pozycję dominującą, podlegając jednocześnie, tak jak się to dzieje na całym świecie, procesowi hybrydyzacji, co oznacza, że coraz rzadziej mamy do czynienia z wideo w czystej formie. Często staje się ono jednym z elementów projektu, instalacji, formą dokumentacji akcji lub performansu, swoistą hybrydą w postaci found footage albo komputerową symulacją. Wystawa We Would Like You To Know That We Are Not Them poprzez kuratorskie ujęcie tematu relacji artysty do jego dzieła przybliża aktulane różnorodne strategie « wizualizowania » świata za pośrednictwem sztuki wideo, będącej narzedziem poznania zarówno rzeczywistości i jak samej sztuki.

Agnieszka Rayzecher, Warszawa, lipiec 2009

map and way from nearest tube station

So, it has happened!!!

In September 2009 we open a new, second space in East London

lokal_30_warszawa_london

on our new adress:

29 Wadeson Str, London E2

on the ground floor of FOXALL ASSOCIATES

just next to

Vyner Str, Mowlem Str and next door to famous BISTROTHEQUE on Wadeson Str.

Please make ready your boats, bisycles, horses, cars, motobicles, planes, shuttles, buses, trains, tubes, metros and undergrounds, foot and other made of transport to come and be with us there in a day of opening the 3rd of September and the entire year! :))

** we are happy to announce an oppening of a new space of lokal_30 on foksal 17b
** residencies, panels, meetings, pro_vocations

lokal_30_UP

ZAPRASZAMY na otwarcie w NOC MUZEOW

Jako glowna przyczyne podal faszystowskie poglady szefa TVP i wycofanie sie polskiej TV publicznej z wspolfinansowania filmu o Sendlerowej.

Wilhelm Sasnal zbojkotował rozdanie Gwarancji Kultury, nagród przyznawanych przez TVP Kultura. Nagrodzono go w kategorii sztuki wizualne za wystawę “Lata walki”, prezentowaną w Zachęcie na przełomie 2007 i 2998 roku

Fot. Albert Zawada / AGENCJA GA

Wilhelm Sasnal

ZOBACZ TAKŻE

• Wilhelm Sasnal zbojkotował nagrody TVP (18-04-09, 12:38)

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• TVP - co dalej z telewizją publiczną?