Iconoclasm
Artur Zmijewski on ‘Them’
Your projects, which culminate in films, often attempt to analyse existing social mechanisms, e.g. Repetition (2005), in which you repeated Professor Zimbardo’s famous prison experiment. In Them (2007), shown at documenta 12, you brought together representatives of four groups: nationalists, leftists, Catholics, and Jews, which in that context suddenly became extreme positions, because everyone very consciously identified with their own group.
‘The Jews represent a minority in Polish society; the majority is formed by the Catholics. And they claim the ownership of Polish patriotism – they believe they are its best exponents. Their position on some issues, such as abortion, can be described as ethical fundamentalism, an attempt to introduce bipolar ethics: good/bad. So the majority’s standpoint can actually be extreme. This is not because of the Jews – it is the All-Poles, after all, who want to get rid of the Jews. The All-Poles are radically-minded nationalists, whereas the Jews in Poland are rather pacific and timid – they are a minority in a country dominated by an unsympathetic majority. So perhaps this is a radicalism of fear. During the discussions and through their actions they almost turned into advocates of the Catholics and All-Poles. This is how the weak behave. To shake them out of their passivity, I had to keep telling them that it was not so much they themselves who didn’t want to interact with the Catholics or the All-Poles, but that it was the ‘discourse of the weak’ which was speaking through them.’
You employed an interesting technique in Them: you arranged a context in which the groups were to communicate using visual language. Groups that normally are unable to communicate with each other were to engage in an interaction – also referred to as a ‘game’ or ‘conversation’ – by using visual means of expression. This is a reference to the methods developed in the 1970s by artists such as KwieKulik, Jan Wojciechowski, Gutt & Raniszewski – students of Oskar Hansen’s and Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz’s who taught in the faculty of sculpture at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Your own teacher, Grzegorz Kowalski, formerly an assistant lecturer under both professors, used this method in his ‘Public Space – Private Space’ task as part of practicing the ‘didactics of partnership’. There is a difference, though. They analysed this visual language, explored its potential, so as to test it in various situations, including public ones. They wanted the results of those ‘lab room’ experiments in the field of art to be applied on the social scale, in order to shake the hierarchy-based communication model of the totalitarian state. You believe that despite the growing intensity of images, people are illiterate in terms of understanding visual language and therefore succumb to manipulation. Rather than being interested in formal issues, in analysing the language of art, you want to study interpersonal relationships, which are influenced by non-rational factors, by emotions. You introduce the method of non-verbal communication into the epicentre of the cultural and political dispute. How do you perceive the results of this experience?
‘The most obvious effect of the action documented by Them is the democratisation of conflict. Political disputes are usually played out among the elites – outsiders remain but observers, sentenced to passivity. They have no say in the process. They can demonstrate in the streets, but the dispute remains controlled by the power elites. In my action, or game, ordinary people gain access to the dispute – they become actors, subjects, playing their stakes against the stakes of others. And, importantly, they do so in a symbolic language (this is not civil war), moving “safely”, but also very intensely, through conflict. One of the most important things happened at the very beginning: they agreed to let others interfere with a particular group’s symbols. They thus agreed that their own symbolic universe could be interfered with and modified by others – whose views they disagree with.’
The ‘interactions’, ‘games’, and ‘visual conversations’ had an ‘open form’ but, in keeping with what Hansen taught, they were subject to rules based on the objective logic of the relationships between visual forms, that is, the rules governing ‘visual structures’. Destruction was justified if it opened room for the next participant’s move/statement. Do you think these experiences were valuable?
‘It is like trying to predict the future – in reality, they learned how to control the group process by following strict rules of play. Seemingly arrested at the formal level, in reality they reflected the image of a rigid society in a single-party dictatorship era, in which, for instance, the struggle for power and the attempt to force through one’s own position were reduced to background processes. In a group, an underlying process is always under way: a struggle for leadership, a dispute over who’s right. They, however, completely froze those processes by following the task’s regimes and focusing all their attention on the grammar of the visual language. The reality of the games in your film was as artificial as the social reality of the 1970s, a time when various forms of activity were restricted.’
But despite the formal rules, the experiments in the 70s also considered a non-logical element, intuition. The method was open to improvisation. On the one hand, they wanted to create a communication model and draw from a non-artistic source of knowledge, science, but on the other, if the subject was, for instance, ‘emotions’, a friendly or unfriendly attitude towards the object of the game, which could be a specific person, they tried to express emotions towards that person using visual means. You go further than that by placing the method at the epicentre of ideological conflict, in effect becoming involved in politics.
‘Art is a laboratory, but its experimental results are seldom applied on a larger scale. In science, the results of lab research are utilised in technology and gradually enter into wider use. It is a bit different with the humanities. They are part of a philosophical ‘laboratory’, whose results are applied in politics, in managing the masses. Philosophy finds justifications for political decisions. Political philosophy is a reflection of politics. There is a direct correlation between art and advertising, design, architecture, the whole man-made visual sphere surrounding us. This is less visible with the “pure” arts. Science and philosophy are, you could say, ‘background discourses’ for technology and politics. The “pure” arts are kind of orphans – we don’t know precisely what they are a background for.’
Artists in the 70s tried to apply their methods on a broad scale, even attempting to win over the government by lodging specific proposals, but they were rejected, probably because they undermined the existing order, the hierarchy of social communication. For some time now, you have been involved in the new left movement, which like any other political formation is interested in seizing power and effecting change.
‘I don’t know what the movement’s ultimate goals are. But we aren’t interested in securing cushy positions for ourselves. There is a broader model of the political: politics as a field of communication, of promoting your views in the public sphere. This is how politics or political sensibility should be understood in this case, as a common space for many people in which they express their needs and can strive for those needs to be fulfilled.’
I’m not talking about cushy jobs in the government but about effectiveness, about real, measurable effects. Art has been marginalised, it is politics that attracts everyone’s attention. Politics is a game, a field of manipulation, of exerting influence.
‘Politics is the visualisation of a field of power – it is in this field that the struggle for realising a certain model of the state, economic relations, cultural regimes, and so on, takes place. And politics doesn’t have to look like it does in Poland today; it seems to me that Polish politicians deliberately create this ugly image of politics in order to discourage potential rivals. Who would ever want to become involved in something as dirty as politics that is based on manipulation, derision and contempt? But you don’t have to call everyone except your own party an enemy. Perhaps you can even call them friends.’
Do you think such grassroots activity can change anything? Have your artistic activities had any effect?
‘I have sought evidence of art’s effectiveness. When, for instance, a radical cultural postulate expressed by an artist in the form of a visual action no longer antagonises the public, does not evoke controversy, it means the message has become mainstream, entered into wide circulation, become part of elite knowledge, or even common knowledge. I think this is evidence that the message has gotten through.’
Perhaps it has simply been ignored?
‘Well, no, because it has caused a stir – the message has been communicated and received. It is us who form the image of the world – we narrate the world to each other. No objective reality in which we all participate exists. Instead, we construct an image of reality, produce our own narratives; they comprise, in fact, the image of reality that we have – the intersubjectivity in which we all participate. Modifying this image, supplementing it, or creating your own narratives, as is done in art or literature, means changing the shape of reality, including the political one. It means influencing how people perceive each other, what they regard as the main issues that need to be solved and the issues that have already been solved, what world they’d like to live in. You can influence what vision of the world people will vote for.’
Do you give any thought to the persuasiveness of art and its instruments? Advertising, politics and even science have been using these in ever more sophisticated ways.
‘We are surrounded by obvious forms of persuasion. Advertising is an intensely persuasive language that tries to make us believe one product is better than all others. Press commentators also use a persuasive language, bent on causing the reader to accept the author’s views. If art reduces the ambiguity of its message, it risks being accused of being journalistic, overly topical, of succumbing to particular needs, to politics. Art is reportedly best when it produces ambiguous messages and is far from political topicality – which, according to critics, are necessary conditions for creating the “Work”. But there’s one question: Isn’t it true that the creation of the Work is something that only critics are interested in? And not the artists? Because the latter have already realised the purpose behind the duty to create Works. It is one of the ways of controlling artists.
In my opinion, Works quickly lose their value – both those made for topical reasons, as well as those dealing with the ‘most touching moments of the human condition’. But the duty to produce them defines the framework of artistic activity accepted by the critics. I think, in fact, that hard persuasion is an instrument of high-brow art – only, the persuasiveness is obscured by the apparent multitude of interpretations. Because either you present a message so ambiguous that the viewer gets confused, or the thing is so precisely told, so openly critical about some element of reality, that it can be comprehended. You can call this persuasion – creating the viewer’s critical attitude towards a given phenomenon. I think it’s far more common than we think. Artists would prefer to conceal this aspect of the artistic language – the fact that it is persuasive, that it tries to take care of some things in reality. However, I like the fact that art tries to effect change, that it struggles for something, strives for something. That various particularisms, various localities are at stake.’
But as far as methods are concerned, it seems to me that advertising and propaganda usually exploit desire, affect emotions by arousing it. Your films also affect emotions powerfully, but in a radically different way; that is, instead of arousing desire they cause cognitive shock. In a very simple, formally unassuming manner, you show things that are usually hidden: inequality, fear of disease, fear of others, pain, conformism, various conflicts, and, most recently, in the Selected Works (2006 – 2007) series, also the everyday life of the members of the ‘underclass’ in capitalist society, the uninteresting life of ‘invisible’ people, people you will hardly ever see on TV.
‘This is the purpose of art. It’s long been so. To show that which is hidden.’
It’d rather seem to me that for centuries it was to seduce and arouse desire?
‘To seduce with form? Let’s remember that form, as Slavoj Žižek wrote, is a strange attractor – it’s not a neutral framework – it includes coordinates that change the shape of the field contained in the framework of form. At least since Courbet, since the moment art formulated the criticism of hierarchical society, the artist has been able to safely criticise authority. He or she is actually obliged to do so.’
Only, authority tactically exploits such criticism as a kind of fig leaf. The artist is treated here as the court jester. He is allowed to criticise because art is not treated seriously.
‘This is a long-standing deal between art and authority. “The ruler no longer says: You must think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us.” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, M. Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno). This is a tall price: art has been excluded from the play of forces that are changing the world.’
At the same time, some artistic actions undermine the symbolic status quo and have very real consequences. We have had many cases in Poland where artists’ actions met with a response – as with Maurizio Catellan’s La Nona Ora, Piotr Uklański’s The Nazis, or Dorota Nieznalska’s Passion. On the one hand, art is able to touch these sensitive spots, something important starts happening in the field of social communication, and, on the other, it is cynically exploited by the populists who use art for their own purposes. They demonstrate indignation because they believe someone has offended their holy symbols.
‘They have the right to believe that…. It attests to the sensitivity of the symbolic fabric entwining society and is, paradoxically, a good sign. This is, in fact, what we are playing for: action triggering a reaction.’
And how should artists respond to something like that? By making another work?
‘By running forward, by starting to use it themselves for political purposes, by pre-empting the move. The artist proposes a game on his own terms: using visual language, criticising some phenomenon through images. In Dorota’s case, it was the criticism of patriarchy. Whereas in the case of Daniel Olbrychski, whom I admire….’
Let’s explain: Daniel Olbrychski is an actor among whose most famous roles was that of a knight fighting against the Swedes during their 17th-century invasion of Poland. Olbrychski entered The Nazis exhibition at Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw, a sabre in his hand, and slashed the portrait of himself in a Nazi uniform. That was his response in the visual ‘conversation’.
‘With The Nazis, Uklański violated the taboo of identification, and Olbrychski understood the violation. In response, he violated the taboo of the gallery and the inviolability of the work of art – they communicated in an equivalent language.
In Nieznalska’s case, the response to her language was the proposition to use another, more powerful language – the language of law. But she didn’t take up the gauntlet and allowed herself to be objectified. And that’s a problem, because it’s not always so that the fundamentalists will choose to respond in the language of images, as proposed by the artist. Rather, they will use their own means and their own languages. Perhaps you have to be able to operate also in another field, have the competence to pull yourself together in such a situation.’
Your work KR WP (2000) can be interpreted on several levels, and it deals with a number of issues that you, literally, laid bare. The military is a hierarchical machine whose essence is obedience, one in which attributes and symbols play an exceptional role. But your film is also about masculinity and the body, about the fragility of the male body covered by the uniform, and about its objectification. But when we see these young boys marching with their guns, naked, their chests thrown out, it’s truly disarming. Did you think about defensive scenarios before you showed it? That work also violated a taboo and entered a potential minefield because the military is serious stuff. Here, the responses could be really blunt.
‘I was able to defend myself – I gave at least two radio interviews. Perhaps they had a cooling effect on the military. That situation, however, was a bit different to Nieznalska’s case because the film carried an implied meaning that ridiculed potential opponents. Had the military tried to sue me for slander, it would have made a laughing stock of itself.
It’s a special process of adaptation that art has undergone, developing hidden defence mechanisms. It’s a bit like with insects. They may be unpalatable or poisonous – which can’t be seen at first sight – but when an animal eats one, it will either puke it out or die poisoned. The same applies to art – it’s a weak discourse. Its weakness stems, among other things, from the fact that it’s associated with femininity, because it uses means attributed to women – emotions, feelings, imagination, and so on. And yet we live in a world of late modernity – dominated by rationality, logic, technology. Post-modernity, that is, generally speaking, the criticism of modernity, has not begun yet. One of the symptoms of that is the marginalisation of art. But there’s one more thing that you can’t help. The cynicism of people that view a work and completely ignore its context, content, meaning. They can look at it and cynically say, for instance, that it’s pure pornography. There are people willing to pass such judgements in public.’
Michał Woliński
