artluk nr 2/2009
Paweł Łubowski
GAMES AND STRATEGIES
An artist – not only a young one – has to choose between various options. Today – in the time of numerous opportunities – it is difficult and important, because it proves decisive for the artist's future. Artists make their own decisions guided by their specific strategies and it often happens that they start identifying themselves with kinds of esthetics which prove different from the ones they used to be associated with. Today such situations are possible as well. Struggling for their art becomes a kind of game played by artists with reality. On the other hand, artists' “migrations” in the world of art result in blurring the borderline between various options. Although the latter have been functioning parallel to each other for a long time, nowadays they seem not to contradict each other any more. And perhaps they have never done so.
In the current artluk issue we are confronting two artistic strategies. One of them is geometric abstraction which was once revolutionary and aimed at building a new world from scratch, the other is art referring to tradition, to the classical roots. Can the two coexist? Do they have anything in common? Today abstraction is not so aggressive – it has been individualized and – in the works created by such splendid artists as Fangor or Gierowski – it has become a statement on human condition. The classical tradition in turn still exists in the works by contemporary artists, hidden or underlying, although it is not so clearly visible in visual arts influenced by Duchamp's spirit as, for instance, in music.
In the face of the complexity of this art another problem appears, i.e. the one of evaluation. Can we – while evaluating art – free ourselves from the doctrines that were attempted to be instilled in us? The measure of our freedom is the extent to which we surrender to them. And it is not solely a political problem (as it is commonly believed), but the one of our inner immunity – with art playing the role of a “sensor” here.
It seems that enjoying freedom and thus – a greater choice we find life more difficult (if we are aware of it). Nevertheless, such complexity offers something for everyone and the borderline produces new phenomena which prove the most interesting.
Front cover:
Stefan Gierowski, CCXXVII, fragment, oil, 1968. Waldemar Andzelm Kolekcja
Magdalena Wróblewska
RUINS OF REPRESENTATION
“THE HISTORY OF ANOTHER” BY SHIMON ATTIE
The color photographs by Shimon Attie immortalize his projections of archival photographs onto the ruins of ancient Rome. Contemporary views of the Eternal are something more to this artistic practice than solely the background for the photographs taken between 1890 and 1920. Thanks to the special visual effects, i.e. the illusion of the interpenetrating spaces of the projected images and the real locations, the ruins became a setting for presenting the Jews photographed a long time ago, the former city dwellers. Performing his "archeological" work the artist managed not only to get the photographs out of the archives, but also to discover their potential meanings through their recontextualization or connection with the places they depict. The first association these works can evoke refers to one of the most important events in the Western history, i.e. the fall of the Roman Empire. To historiography the catastrophe of this civilization has become metaphorical and its ruins have turned into a symbol reminding of changing fortunes and of the origins and falls of other empires. In time the might and glory in a state of ruin became the source of inspiration for artists, especially important in the Age of Enlightenment when ruins were viewed not only as a moral history lesson, but also as a way of seeing the surrounding reality (J. Soane, J. F. Fussli). The motif of ruins turned into an autonomous esthetic phenomenon the attractiveness of which was not only based on certain visual qualities or the possibility of "completing" the view in one's imagination, i.e. of reconstructing the non-existent elements, but also accompanied with some semantic qualities grounded on the peculiar ambivalence of meanings referring to universal dichotomies of modern culture, including the ones of civilization and nature, might and fall, the old and the new, birth and death. Those general meanings attributed to ruins in the 18th and 19th centuries took shape in Shimon Attie's project in a special way. "Great history" the ruins of the Empire remind of seemed of little interest to the artist. He preferred concentrating on discovering untold histories the peripheral and forgotten "microhistories". He wanted to find the meaning that was not written in stone or architecture and was absent in the public space. Photo Shimon Attie,
Looking onto Temple of Apollo,The History of Another
project, 2001-2002. Photo courtesy of Sh. Attie
Jerzy Olek
PERFECTION OF PROGRAM
Manfred Mohr started being perfect when he abandoned abstract expressionism in the 1960s. The change concerned not only his style or artistic convention, but also his method of work. The method required the manic precision of activities and orderliness, although the influence of the artist’s hidden nature is also conceivable here. Since the 1960s Mohr has consistently followed the chosen path constructing images and their animations. His constructions, suggesting spatial dimension, or
multidimensionality, have remained flat. Apart from his rare reliefs the
artist’s rich oeuvre includes drawings, acrylic paintings on canvas and
computer images generated in accordance with the rigorous system of binary
decisions – all of them created on his way from “handicraft” to the electronic
production of rationalized imagination.
About half a century ago few artists were interested in the opportunities computers presented them with. In time their number was increasing. The tool seemed universal offering limitless possibilities. It was tempting, but at the same time deceptive. The growing popularity of the so-called computer art and the enormous amount of trash the latter produced put off with esthetic shallowness. In the tangle of misunderstandings the situations when images revealing the justified use of that particular tool with their shape and expression made a mark were still rare. Those rare images included the ones by Mohr, recognizable thanks to their pared-down form and convincing because of the artist’s consistent, system attitude towards the artistic creation process treated as the superior value. The initial stages of Mohr’s “love affair” with computers resulted from two vital aspects. The intellectual one
stemmed from Max Bense’s informative esthetics and the methodological one from
the works by the composer Pierre Barbaud, one of the pioneers of using
calculating machines in the field of music. The young artist was attracted to
the rational attitude towards understanding and creating art. It enabled him to
control the strictly programmed process of creation that guaranteed
unrestricted algorithm penetration of created works, which could be achieved
thanks to the conscious introduction of random elements into the program. It satisfied
his needs as a free-jazz musician.
Series of drawings generated using a computer, dependent on each other and resulting from a sequence of numerical events, seemed to be closely related to score notations in contemporary music, the most abstract one of all arts.
Photo
Manfred Mohr, Klangfarben, 2007, 2 examples (animated GIF images)
based on the work entitled P1271, algorhitmic animation in real time. Photo courtesy of J. Olek
"ROCK – PAPER – SCISSORS"
IRANIAN ARTIST’S PLAY WITH HISTORY
Katarzyna Kleiber interviews Žinos Taqizādeh
The solo show of the works by the Iranian artist Žinos Taqizādeh entitled Rock – Paper – Scissors, which opened at the Teheran-based Ārān Gallery on January 30th, 2009, i.e. a few days before the 30th anniversary of the outbreak of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, proved that contemporary Iranian art attempts to describe in its own language the changes the country has been undergoing since the fall of the last Shah of Iran.
Katarzyna Kleiber: The collages of the Āsār-e ruznāmei [Newspaper Works] cycle you showed at the exhibition, which constitute the juxtapositions of the works by the 15th-19th-century masters of Western art and the images from the Islamic-Revolution-period daily papers (1979), can be surprising for European viewers. Why did you put the reproduced fragments of paintings by H. Bosch, Caravaggio, A. Gentileschi, Th. Géricault and J. L. David against the background of a Persian text concerning executions, arrests and street riots? Why did you decide to combine European painting with the photographs showing the last public appearances of the Shah, Ayatollah Khomeini addressing the crowd or revolution manifestations?
Žinos Taqizādeh: There were two reasons why I decided to create such compositions. The first – personal one stemmed from the fact that to my visual memory European painting and the front-page images from Iranian newspapers of 1979 are parallel. At the time of the Revolution I was 7 and I was watching my elder sister – then studying art – copy paintings by the masters of Western art. Simultaneously, at that stage of my life I was looking at the front pages of Iranian papers reporting the events preceding the outbreak of the Islamic Revolution. In my memory the two kinds of images melted into one whole. The second reason why I decided to juxtapose Western painting with Persian-newspaper images was the belief that there were numerous similarities between the historical events presented by European painters and the ones happening in Iran in 1979, especially between the French Revolution shown in The Oath of the Horatii and The Death of Marat by J. L. David, and the Islamic Revolution in Iran. I think that both revolutions were at first excessively idealistic and both of them finally turned into dictatorships, although at the beginning they were clearly universal and democratic. Working on the project I also noticed some visual similarities – I associated the cut-off heads in Géricault’s drawings and paintings with the photographs I had seen in newspapers showing the executions of the Shah’s opponents and the killed adversaries of the Islamic Revolution.
Photo
Žinos Taqizādeh, Āsār-e ruznāmei (Newspaper
Works) cycle, collage, 2008.
Photo courtesy of K. Kleiber
PAINTING LOOKS AT ME LIKE CYCLOPS
Marta Smolińska-Byczuk interviews Wojciech Fangor
Marta Smolińska-Byczuk: The second half of the 20th century appears a period when the exploration of traditional easel-painting potential was especially intense; numerous artists were aiming at extending its limits. Can your artistic work be seen from that angle? What effect did you expect your spatial compositions and experiments with space to have? Have you used the resulting possibilities and experiences to create works on traditional, rectangular canvases? Did you feel back then that a painting as such was limiting you? Did you wish you could lift those limitations in order to enter space totally? In that case why did you decide to continue creating paintings instead of taking up solely space installations? What was it that kept you from abandoning easel painting?
Wojciech Fangor: The art of spatial compositions was probably partly conditioned by the socioeconomic situation in the Polish People's Republic. Art had no raison d'ętre neither as an illustration of new philosophical ideas – because the appropriate philosophy had been established once and for all – nor as a market product or a symbol of a particular owner's important position and wealth. Consequently, its chances were better if it were popularized in the society and commonly available. That was the ground for the success of poster art. I have figured that out observing the realities of life in Western capitalist democracies where works of art should fit their individual or corporate owners' safe. I sometimes hold shows or create spatial objects for the community, but individually a small painting is found satisfactory.
Marta Smolińska-Byczuk: What role in creating the sense of space do you attribute to the color, outline – sharp or soft, shape and size of the pictorial field?
Wojciech Fangor: A sharp outline sticks to the surface and categorically determines the place, size, shape and color; it makes an impression that everything is OK. The soft one in turn thanks to its relativity and the appearance of movement causes frustration and provokes an escape to the world of virtual space. The optimal effect is conditioned by the scale of a given object and the distance between an object and a viewer. If the scale is too small or the distance too large the effect weakens.
Marta Smolińska-Byczuk: What is the reason why you have employed figuration and representative painting again? Does a human figure, or a recognizable object, have anything about it that cannot be presented using geometry?
Wojciech Fangor: Creating spatial illusions is a part of the structure of the language we communicate in, which encoded in visual contrasts – produces a particular content. The figuration of recognizable objects is useful in this game provided that the objects are anecdotically banal and do not aspire to illustrate sociopolitical ideologies.
There are two kinds of shock. One is thematic, anecdotic, social, religious, etc. Like, for instance, the shock experienced by a schoolgirl seeing a flasher. The other concerns a new structure for conveying a particular message, a new language. Such a shock happens only once or twice a century, whereas one can stupefy others with genitals on the cross or crescent every second day.
Photo
Wojciech Fangor, Sygnatura, 2008, Center of Polish Sculpture, Orońsko. Photograph by R. Fangor. Photo courtesy of W. Fangor
Ewelina Jarosz
EXPERIENCING TIME
The photographic works of the Transfiguracja Odyna (Odin's Transfiguration, 2009) cycle by Natalia LL reveal a special way of experiencing time since they refer to the Celtic-Germanic myth concerning a warlike god and creator who manifested himself through metamorphoses (he changed from an old man into a youth and he took animal forms) as well as in relation to the credibility of the human body. Thus, the photographs allow for noticing the human problem of transitoriness in the light of the myth. At the same time Natalia LL's myth-and-body confrontation enables us to share a more general reflection on the condition of a female artist involved in the discourse of reality her art is functioning in and in another discourse aiming at freedom, hoping to change the existing situation, trusting in the power of creation that allows for viewing one's own historic nature from a certain perspective.
Photo
Natalia LL, Transfiguracja Odyna III, 2009. Photo courtesy of Natalia LL
Justine Price
DIALECTICAL REDRESS: “ACTION/ABSTRACTION: POLLOCK, DE KOONING AND AMERICAN ART, 1940–1976”
Reflecting upon recent developments in art the critic, Ernest Chesneau, who was not particularly sympathetic to novelty in art, worried aloud that if contemporary trends were not brought to a halt, painters would go on to represent traditional or academic historical scenes by reducing them to two tones: one green and another, gray or blue, for the sky. Therein would lie the value of the work, and therein the effect. This was 1864 in Paris, when modern art would have been synonymous with the art of the Parisian scene. Since Chesneau's time, art critics have been concerned over the negation of painterly conventions, possibly absurdly, to their common denominators: broad strokes of colored pigments applied to a support, or–in extremis–a blank canvas tacked to the wall. Other critics, possibly less concerned with the finality of the object, have been concerned with the act of painting, the expressive gesture, the mark of individuality. As the French literary giant, Émile Zola once famously declared, that the Moderns painted “nature seen through a bit of temperament.” The painters of the New York School, those active in the 1940s and 1950s especially, seemed to have taken the instinctive act of painting abstraction to extremes.
Photo
Installation view of Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976 on view at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery from February 13-June 14, 2009. Photograph by Tom Loonan. Image courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, 2009.
Wiktor Dyndo, Meczet Ibn Tulun, oil, 2008