ANCESTORS

SOCIAL INPUT

ARTUR ŻMIJEWSKI

Born May 26th, 1966 in Warsaw. In 1990-1995 he studied in Grzegorz Kowalski's studio at the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Associated with the Foksal Gallery Foundation. Lives and works in Warsaw.

Artur Zmijewski is a radical artist, realising extreme artistic concepts. In his works, in a nearly obsessive manner he thematises the human body perceived in the context of its physicality, its base biological functions. This perspective imposes questions about the relationship between the body, susceptible to illness and decay, and the sphere of human mind and spirit. What the artist finds most interesting, are cases, where heavy bodily dysfunction and severe disease foreclose any possibility of participation in social life and even destroy the mind. At the same time, he admits, those defects create a kind of otherness, seductive and much more telling than anything we consider normal. And this is Zmijewski at his most poignant.

The early works of Artur Zmijewski, realised during his studies, are constructions - machines or humanoid mechanisms, whose actions mimic one somatic or mental human aspect, such as fear, the stench of decaying flesh, the circulation of bodily fluids etc. His graduation project, 40 SZUFLAD / 40 Drawers (illustrations), is a photographic object, consisting of forty black-and-white photographs of a nude couple, who knead and deform each other's body. The artist placed the images in an arc-shaped library catalogue cabinet. The drawers have been equipped with a spring mechanism, so one has to overcome a certain resistance to open them. Zmijewski's interest was in the forms, a body subjected to oppression can take on. The video POWSCIAGLIWOSC I PRACA / Temperance and Work, (1995) was a continuation of that approach. In 1996 he presented the film JA I AIDS / Me and AIDS (illustrations) showing nude men and women, crashing into each other violently, in slow motion.
For the exhibition PARTEITAG (1997), devoted to the phenomenon of evil, Zmijewski realised the video OGROD BOTANICZNY/ZOO / The Botanic Garden/Zoo (illustrations). He filmed a group of mentally impaired children in the botanical garden in Birmingham, and juxtaposed those images with footage of animals from the zoo nearby. This film was a specific kind of experiment whose aim was to test predispositions to release base and evil tendencies inherent in human nature, and, what follows, the instinct to do evil.

The disabled body and corporal defect are subject of interest for the artist as figures of mental or spiritual disability. The juxtaposition of a defective body and a healthy one allows for a metaphoric account of human relationships. In 1998 the artist realised OKO ZA OKO / Eye for an Eye , a project consisting of a series of large-format colour photographs and a video. They depict posing nude people with amputated limbs together with physically fit ones, who "lend" them the missing members. The naked bodies of the pictures' protagonists have been arranged by the artist into amusing compositions, forming corporal hybrids - people with two heads, two pairs of arms, etc., and, at the same time, new healthy organisms, where the healthy offer relief to the disabled.

Questions about socially approved "norms" of humanity and about our relation to people functioning or looking different recur in Artur Zmijewski's work. Infirmity, disability or illness are embarrassing problems that do not fit into the image of young, beautiful, and healthy people, as promoted by mass culture.

In 2000 the film KR WP was released, featuring soldiers from the Polish Army's Honour Guard Unit. In the film, at first they practise military drill in full uniform, and then do the same nude in a ballet room, equipped with rifles, boots and caps only. This work also touches upon issues of the body, this time entangled in the forms imposed by military training, appropriated by military ritual.

The film NA SPACER / Out for a Walk was realised in 2001 with the help of paralysed people, in a rehabilitation clinic. Those absolutely torpid people with all their limbs paralysed, were taken out for a short walk by healthy, strong men, operators, who animated their bodies, imitating normal movements.
In the same year the first part of the project Lekcja spiewu / The Singing Lesson, was realised with the participation of deaf-mute youths, was finished. The film was recorded at the Holy Trinity Evangelical Church of the Augsburg confession in Warsaw, where the a choir of deaf-mutes "sang" the KYRIE by Jan Maklakiewicz. The work was presented among others at the Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt am Main. The second part of the project was realised in 2002 in the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where deaf-mute and heavily hearing-impaired youths sang Bach's cantata HERZ UND MUND UND TAT UND LEBEN (Heart and Mouth and Deed and Life). The "deaf choirs" were accompanied by organ music. The singing Lesson is another work with disabled people, in which the artists transgresses a seemingly impassable boundary, he takes up the challenge and tries to change an irreversible situation. The miracle does not happen, one cannot transcend disability, but the transformation can occur in the reception of the work, providing the viewer accepts the otherness of the world of the disabled and acknowledges their right to self-expression. "Art is a hard fight for human consciousness", claims Zmijewski.

Updating - October 2006

Author of photographic objects, photographic and video works; independent curator of group exhibitions (among others JA I AIDS / Me and AIDS, 1996, exhibition series PARTEITAG, 1997, 1998, 1999, SEXXX, 2000, POLSKA / Poland, 2002), editor of the artzine "CZEREJA", appearing on an irregular basis in 1992-1998 (six issues), author of theoretic and critical texts. In 2000 he was awarded the first prize at the exhibition "Guarene Arte 2000" in Guarene d'Alba, Italy and represented Poland at the 51st Venice Biennial in 2006.

As early as during his studies, Artur Zmijewski developed a theoretical stance concerning art and its relation to reality, whose point of departure was the question about the place and role of the artist in society. In his graduation paper, "Moja teoria sztuki" / "My Theory of Art" (1995), the artist formulated his theses most extensively. In his opinion, art should influence social consciousness and stimulate reflection, hence his demand for a corresponding strength of impact and provocativeness of art. As a consequence, in his "favourite theory" art is intimately bound to the time of its conception, and, at some point, it has to become obsolete. At the same time, what Zmijewski demands of art criticism is to resign on evaluation in favour of an "adequate answer", that is, a discursive elaboration of the ideas imminent in the work.

The strategy most frequently used by Zmijewski is to arrange situations and look, how the protagonists would behave. That is why his video works often remind fictionalised documentaries. BEREK / The Game of Tag, 1999 is one of the best examples. Zmijewski filmed a group of people in two rooms: a symbolically neutral space and the gas chamber of a former Nazi death camp. Naked men and women of various ages play the game of tag - some of them are ashamed, others engage in the game. According to the artist, this film is an example of a kind of therapy, used in psychology: the re-enactment of a traumatic event with a simultaneous shifting of its meaning.

In the film SZTUKA KOCHANIA / The Art of Loving, 2000, Zmijewski recorded people suffering from Parkinson's disease, who, as a result, cannot fully control their bodies. Nevertheless, the unwanted impulses, tics and uncontrolled tremors are used to show their feelings to their loved ones.
In Karolina (illustrations), a film from 2002, we see a bedridden young woman suffering from osteoporosis. Her broken bones cause incredible pain with every move. Watching her suffering is a hard task, but
"The world is a dangerous place - says Zmijewski - and 'KAROLINA' is also about that."
The woman tries to commit suicide by overdosing analgesics. Her demand for the right to die in this extreme situation is an expression of her courage in deciding upon her own life. Through his film, the artist makes her voice heard.

As a result of a trip to Israel in 2003 there emerged a series of films, in which Zmijewski makes use of the documentary mode of film making and also of interviews, touching upon delicate issues of memory, the complicated situation of the country's inhabitants, and the not always easy Polish-Jewish relations. In PIELGRZYMKA / PILGRIMAGE, realised together Pawel Althamer, the artists take part in an organised journey to the Holy Land. Mingled with the Polish group, they accompany the pilgrims on their way to places of cult connected with the person of Christ, and to places of Jewish martyrology (Yad Vashem). Religious experiences mix with expressions of an ambivalent relation to the Jewish nation, verging on xenophobia and anti-Semitism. In NASZ SPIEWNIK / OUR SONGBOOK Zmijewski evokes in the memory of Polish Jews, who left for Israel tens of years ago, songs from their childhood and adolescence. The memories, rarely brought to mind, seem to be merely scraps of once popular songs. The monologue of the protagonist of he film Itzik, full of religious references, is a manifestation of his hatred towards the Palestinians. According to him, the Holocaust gave the Israelis the licence to revenge upon others. By contrast, the title protagonist of Lisa is a German woman living in Israel who claims that in her former life she was a Jewish boy shot by a Nazi in the back of his head (she claims to feel pain there). As a result of God's revelation she learned that she had to move to Israel. In the new country, however, she feels lonely and alien.

The issue of the Holocaust memory reappears in the film 80064 from 2004. Its title is the camp number of a former Auschwitz prisoner, Jozef Tarnawa. Zmijewski persuades him to have it re-tattooed. The artist wanted the film to be an attempt at "opening the door of memory", a sudden "eruption of recollections" through the reminding of a past humiliation. The man hesitates, but finally, gives in to Zmijewski's strenuous persuasions. The scene in the tattoo shop depicts (and re-enacts) the conformist mechanism of the total acceptance of fate and of subjecting to inhuman rules, which gave the camp prisoners a slight chance to survive.
In 2004, Artur Zmijewski made two works featuring Wojciech Krolikiewicz - an actor suffering from Huntington's chorea. The disease deprives the man of control over his body, causes difficulties with speech, and makes the most trivial everyday activities serious obstacles. Zmijewski portrayed him in the film entitled Rendez-vous. Krolikiewicz prepares to go out, and then meets in a pizzeria with Danuta Witkowska, also suffering from Huntington's. Their behaviour attracts other people's gaze. On the occasion of the exhibition at Centre d'art Contemporain in Brétigny, Zmijewski recorded a CD with Shakespeare Sonnets read by Krolikiewicz (WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, SONNETS).

Artur Zmijewski's project Powtorzenie / REPETITION was chosen to represent Poland at the 51st Venice Biennial in 2005. The artist decided to re-conduct the experiment of Philip Zimbardo from 1971, known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo, a specialist in the "psychology of evil", analysed the behaviour of ordinary people, placed in the roles of prisoners and wards in a set up prison. The experiment was to prove that human behaviour is predictable and depends on the circumstances people find themselves in. Over thirty years later, Zmijewski quite exactly recreated Zimbardo's experiment in Poland. The experiment, however, took an extremely different turn - the participants (both prisoners and wards) together decided to leave the prison, revolting against the author of the project. Zmijewski's film aroused much controversy in his home country.

In autumn 2005, Artur Zmijewski was invited to participate in an opening exhibition of a series of shows at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, entitled W SAMYM CENTRUM UWAGI / AT THE VERY CENTRE OF ATTENTION. The aim of this project was to assess the actual situation of art in Poland. Together with Pawel Althamer, Zmijewski resigned from an individual project in favour of the curatorial project WYBORY.PL / [S]ELECTION.PL. In the gallery space they decided to reconstruct a creative exercise from Grzegorz Kowalski's studio - OBSZAR WSPOLNY I OBSZAR WLASNY / COMMON SPHERE AND PRIVATE SPHERE - at the same time, revising some of its assumptions. Hence they invited their former colleagues from Kowalski's studio. The CSA's exhibition spaces became the locus of unrestrained artistic activity and creative dialogue. Zmijewski and Althamer performed an anarchic deconstruction of the institutionalised exhibition space by replacing exhibition with process.

DUALITY

Kádár's Kiss - Private Hungary 12 - Film by Peter Forgacs


Kádár's Kiss - Private Hungary 12 - Film by Peter Forgacs from Peter Forgacs on Vimeo.

After 1956 the Hungarian Communist dictatorship under Party Secretary János Kádár was a "softer" version of the Soviet rule. But its double speak, repression and shameless ideological or political perversion contradicts the everyday life behind the doors of private homes. Kádár's Kiss ironically explores the Kafkaesque Hungarian life and politics juxtaposing the public and the private Hungarian histories.

POWER

Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics. Art, argues distinguished theoretician Boris Groys, is hardly a powerless commodity subject to the art market's fiats of inclusion and exclusion. In Art Power, Groys examines modern and contemporary art according to its ideological function. Art, Groys writes, is produced and brought before the public in two ways—as a commodity and as a tool of political propaganda. In the contemporary art scene, very little attention is paid to the latter function; the official and unofficial art of the former Soviet Union and other former Socialist states, for example, is largely excluded from the field of institutionally recognized art, usually on moral grounds (although, Groys points out, criticism of the morality of the market never leads to calls for a similar exclusion of art produced under market conditions).

Arguing for the inclusion of politically motivated art in contemporary art discourse, Groys considers art produced under totalitarianism, Socialism, and post-Communism. He also considers today’s mainstream Western art—which he finds behaving more and more according to the norms of ideological propaganda: produced and exhibited for the masses at international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. Contemporary art, Groys argues, demonstrates its power by appropriating the iconoclastic gestures directed against itself—by positioning itself simultaneously as an image and as a critique of the image. In Art Power, Groys examines this fundamental appropriation that produces the paradoxical object of the modern artwork.

About the Author

Boris Groys is Professor of Philosophy and Art Theory at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Global Professor at New York University. He is the author of many books, including The Art of Stalinism and Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (Afterall Books, 2006).

"Boris Groys is an extraordinarily gimlet-eyed observer of the impact visual art has on contemporary art-world institutions. Anyone interested in the balance of aesthetic and political power among artists, collectors, curators, and the audience needs to read Groys's lapidary essays."
—Gregg M. Horowitz, Department of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University

"Boris Groys produces more provocations, more paradoxes per page than any other critic. Here, in one short book, are radical propositions about religion (that it represents perfect 'opinionlessness' and is therefore the medium par excellence), the autonomy of art (that it is guaranteed by the absence of aesthetic judgment), political art (that it does not exist in contemporary art market), communist-era art (that it is invisible to the West because it lacked a market structure), art theory (that the hope of avoiding it entails a theory of race), and images of war and terror (that they are the new iconophilia, the new visual authority). All these unexpected propositions are made in the hope of a slow, complex, incremental return to authorship, authority, presence, and the sublime."
—James Elkins, author of What Happened to Art Criticism?

"This magisterial overview situates contemporary art—its aesthetic strategies, institutions and drives—within the deeper context of the Modernist revolution, urbanism, new technologies, and the post communist era. Groys' combines revelatory analysis with philosophical questions that go to the heart of cultural production today."
—Iwona Blazwick, Director, Whitechapel Gallery

Art Power

EDUCATION

Kunst is een vreemdeling. Een indringer die de rust verstoort. Je kunt hem negeren. Je kunt zijn aanwezigheid ook aangrijpen om kennis te maken met het onbekende. Stichting InterArt stimuleert dat laatste met interdisciplinaire en interculturele kunstprojecten. We prikkelen makers van kunst en het publiek tot een dialoog. Het uiteindelijke doel is altijd jezelf en de ander te ontdekken en te begrijpen. Op www.stichtinginterart.nl vindt u meer informatie over onze visie en onze projecten.

InterArt is een culturele instelling die middels multidisciplinaire kunstprojecten maatschappelijke vraagstukken onder brede aandacht brengt met als doel sociale betrokkenheid te bevorderen.

InterArt gelooft in het belang van kunst voor de ontplooiing van het individu maar ook voor de verwezenlijking van een sociaal sterke samenleving en wil daarom meer mensen en vooral jongeren bij kunst betrekken. Om die doelstelling te verwezenlijken ontwikkelt InterArt projecten die jongeren kennis laten maken met beeldende kunst, theater en muziek.





Foto's Zoë D. Cochia
zcochia.blogspot.com

Nieuw Cultureel Burgerschap is een bevlogen zoektocht naar balans tussen individuele vrijheid en maatschappelijke verantwoordelijkheid. Deze zoektocht wordt geleid door InterArt in de vorm van vier weekenden werkconferenties in vier grote steden, de publicatie van een boek met 16 dialogen en de verkiezing van de Nieuw Culturele Burger van 2008. Deze website dient als platform voor theorie, praktijkvoorbeelden, interviews en alle informatie over de vier werkconferenties.

www.cultureelburgerschap.nl

WORK

Please see the documentary on
The houses of Hristina




I just watched one more documentary about labor/work. So, I try to watch a few documentaries to get inspired to think; about my thesis, about stuff in general. My thesis is about labor & moral questions, so it's hardly a coincidence that I write about these (sadly) not very well known documentary films. Suzanne Raes' film about Hristina, cleaner of upper class Dutch homes, is another gem of insights about the complexities of work and labor in a world that is all capitalism and class differences and national borders. Hristina was born in Bulgaria. She moved to the Netherlands, illegally. She has studied agroeconomics. The film depicts Hristina's goings about in the homes of people whose desire it is not to bother about things such as cleaning. They want Hristina the cleaner to be discreet, invisible; as if the cleaning got done automatically, by itself. A wonderful stuffing away of stuff, a wonderful oder of things. Well, she is there, even though she says she has a hard time understanding it herself. She discusses the strange feeling of loss of reality she gets. Hristina discusses her job and her mixed thoughts about it, her mixed feelings about her own position & role. Hristina says that her employers want her job to be invisible, that her presence is invisible; mostly, she works when they are not at home. But then she adds that she wants her personality and heart to be present in her job. That's, of course, a highly political clash of perspectives. These people for whom Hristina works want an efficient cleaner, one who is cheap and unobtrusive ("they are not interested in my stories.") - they end up with human workforce but everything "human" about it is very inconvenient and upsetting for the employer, the wealthy family with work & kids to tend to. Hristina is a photographer, too. She asks her employers if she can shoot pictures in the house. "Yes, but not today," responds one family via the glorious media of post-its, "our house is too messy".

From thisemptyflow.blogspot.com