Exhibitions
Reaching Tentacles into Reality
Misha Kavka
In his early meditation on the purpose of art, Artur Zmijewski likens the artist to a pickpocket. It is not that he wants to thieve from us, exactly; rather, he believes the artist should seek to exploit our 'niches of inattention' so as to 'penetrate, without any state of mediation', our innermost condition.1 In the intervening decade, Zmijewski's work has remained driven by this will to extend probing fingers into our most intimate pockets, lowering 'cognitive tentacles into reality' for the sake of a knowledge that can only come from our inattentive moments, from lapses in our conscious defense systems.2 The material of his art is thus subjective, social reality.
Aside from some early sculptures made during his days as a student at the Faculty of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1990–95), Zmijewski's corpus consists of short to medium-length films and a few photographic series documenting encounters he has devised, from straightforward interviews (e.g., Itzik, 2003) to complex situations like arranging hearing-impaired kids to sing a Bach cantata (Singing Lesson 2, 2003), restaging Philip Zimbardo's prison-cell 'Stanford experiment' (Repetition, 2005), or inviting representatives of antagonistic ideologies to make art for each other (Them, 2007). In each of these scenarios, the artwork engages with reality rather than representation, relationality rather than self-sufficiency, subjectivity rather than objectivity. Each staged encounter or experiment dares to mess with the messiness of the real, serving as a take-off point for unpredictable responses, actions, emotions. In the process, Zmijewski stretches his cognitive tentacles into the darker corners of the collective psyche, staging encounters of power and history, oppression and subordination, pain and pleasure, shame and exuberance—though in the dressed-down garb of ordinary people and sometimes stripped to the skin.
When an artwork generates an event and the camera serves as a tool of documentation rather than a stylistic device, we might well ask what kind of art we're dealing with and what best to call such an artist. As Joanna Mytkowska puts it, Zmijewski makes 'directed documentaries', filming situations that, in his own words, he has 'provoked and set in motion'.3 We might thus call him a 'provocateur', except his approach is always low key; or a designer, though one less interested in abstract forms than in the impact people have on each other; or even a 'deviser', if it weren't for the overtones of deception. Although Zmijewski's devising may shape the reality that ends up on the screen, the truth of the event lies in his subjects' responses. Confronted with a camera filming them in a situation to which they have acquiesced but not fully consciously signed up to, Zmijewski's subjects remind us that our being is always performed for others against a historical and psychological backdrop we can only partly grasp. With a mischievous glance, one might point out that his work has more in common with reality TV than might be supposed. Indeed, the question of how to categorise this art falls away in the context of reality TV, which makes no such pretensions and yet similarly seeks to generate a kind of intimate knowledge from our 'niches of inattention'. Zmijewski takes the direct approach: his name appears in the closing credits of his films either without caption or under the simple heading of 'Author'.
As someone committed to changing the boundaries, function, and definition of art,4 Zmijewski has retained a critical distance from the term 'artist', at least to the extent that such a person represents a cultural fantasy equal parts malady and privilege.5 He seems more comfortable with the role of the anthropologist, a legacy of his training in the sculpture studio of Grzegorz Kowalski at the Academy of Fine Arts, where students were encouraged 'to study, describe, and attempt to understand human behaviour and ritual' free of the limitations imposed by ethics or morality.6 The films themselves, in their purpose and aesthetics, tend more to the anthropological than what we conventionally recognise as the artistic. Having made the decision to move from malleable material to the camera, which he finds 'a more convenient and more flexible tool' than the 'clumsy and unwieldy… equipment' of classical sculpture,7 Zmijewski has become a documentarist, a wielder of an observant lens whose primary material is the bodies in front of the camera. As Jan Verwoert argues, it is not the camera but 'the body itself [that is] the primary medium through which Zmijewski develops his philosophy of … incarnation'.8 This is notable in his first celebrated exhibit, An Eye for an Eye (photographs and video, 1998), which brings people who are missing limbs into physical contact with the able-bodied. The latter 'lend their own limbs to the handicapped', creating a striking symbiosis of a double human being.9 Such an anthropology of the body offers a different kind of knowledge than the regimented, language-bound basis of science. Here, reality is both harder and more full of unpredictable possiblity than the frameworks of academic investigation allow.
According to Zmijewski, 'Knowledge isn't usually a vehicle for desires and feelings, it's not an outlet for flaunting ecstasy or shame, knowledge usually isn't an outburst of extreme subjectivity—but in art it is.'10 Through the body, art can speak what it knows; through art, the body can speak what it knows. It is the body that mediates between the social world and the material world, both of them stubbornly insistent in their way. While the social world consists of rules and hierarchies, the material world is physically recalcitrant, resistant to categorisation. This intersection is one reason for Zmijewski's ongoing interest in mutilated and diseased bodies, culminating in Rendez-vous (2004), which documents two people who suffer from Huntington's chorea going for a walk and having a pizza. Their constant jerky movements, sharp intakes of breath, and involuntary humming demonstrate a flesh at odds with the will, even as they are scrutinised with suspicion by the 'normal 'people they pass. Such bodies are imbued with oppressive social meaning—as odd, incomplete, unnatural—at the same time as they represent a materiality which just is, resistant to pacification, regrowth, healing. Zmijewski's aim is to overturn the social hierarchy, to make the 'normal' people serve as the support and supplement to the abnormal.11 But what also comes across, especially in Rendez-vous, is that the body has a language of its own, a gestural language that is supra-linguistic, exceeding that which can be captured in words or conventional signification.
At its most exuberant, this is the impulse behind Singing Lesson 2, in which deaf children practise and then perform a Bach cantata (complete with professional conductor, chamber orchestra, and solo soprano) in the grand setting of the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where Bach himself was music master. The result is cacophonous, and viewers may feel a degree of shame in watching this 'failed' experiment or in finding the attempt so compelling. And yet what is most striking about the experiment is what does succeed: the deaf chorus more or less accurately reproduces the shape, volume, and punctuation of notes they cannot hear; the only thing missing is pitch, just as the 'only 'thing missing in An Eye for an Eye is the odd limb or two. In the process, two things happen: the children obviously enjoy themselves, finding a certain liberation in this new task, but their self-consciousness also breaks down the cultural norms of musical performance, especially the romantic notion that musician and listener must somehow be 'inside' the music. For performers who can't hear and hence remain on the 'outside', to make music is a material and even laborious process undermining the cultural norms of taste and beauty, which privilege pitch over the concentrated joy of shaping sounds.
At this level of the supra-linguistic, where bodies recall a materiality that cannot be subdued by signification, history also comes into play, since a material body is shaped as much by what has happened to it as by its physical capacities. For Sebastian Cichocki, 'Zmijewski confronts the body with the obligations of the past, pushing it into the cogwheels of history.'12 There is a particular history behind Zmijewski's work, as well as a more general one. As Mytkowska argues, the particular history concerns the failure of language to keep pace with the rapid changes to Eastern European governmental ideologies in the 1980s and '90s, but these are themselves part of 'a far more complex process of the disconnection of the language of political and social discourse from its object'.13
To overcome this failure or disconnection of language, Zmijewski often places bodies in settings where they oscillate between replaying history and spinning gleefully against it. In The Game of Tag (1999), naked adults play tag, first self-consciously and then with more abandon, in a dank house cellar and the gas chamber of a former Nazi concentration camp. In KR WP (2000), ex-soldiers of the Polish Army's Honour Guard sing, march, and present arms, first in full regalia and then naked but for their rhythmically stomping boots. In Zeppelintribüne, arguably the most stylised of Zmijewski's films, a Turkish couple dances with shiny new shovels on the trash-strewn ruins of the Zeppelinfeld architectural podium near Nuremberg, where Hitler rallied troops as well as shovel-bearing workers. In this film, the dancing body-shovel duo lends its beauty to the camera, just as the athletic body lent its beauty to Leni Riefenstahl's documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Olympia. At the same time, however, the playful irony of dancing with a shovel through the streets of Nuremberg undercuts these fascist images. In all of these encounters between past and present, power and playfulness, the mise-en-scène touches on a landmark of cultural memory, which the body, as Zmijewski's medium, restages and rewrites.
There are, however, more sombre, less rewritable intersections between the body and history. In 80064 (2004), a Polish survivor of Auschwitz is convinced by Zmijewski to have his concentration-camp number re-tattooed for the camera. Here the author replays a historical moment, but disturbingly takes on the role of the oppressor, reinscribing the power relation between Nazi commandant and Jew into the man's flesh. Although the survivor initially resists, calling the act 'a burden on me', it is authenticity, not authority, that worries him; wondering what will happen 'if other survivors see it [the fresh tattoo]', he frets after the re-tattooing that 'everyone will be able to tell I renovated it, like a piece of furniture'. History for art's sake can make you feel cheap, it seems, but the disturbing implication is that the (authentic) mark of victimisation might itself be a prized possession because it undercuts our favoured discourse of human dignity. In Repetition, a project made for the 2005 Venice Biennale, Zmijewski restages an experiment carried out at Stanford University in 1971, when Professor Philip Zimbardo took a group of male volunteers, randomly assigned them roles of guards or prisoners, and placed them in a prison situation.
Replayed in post-communist Poland, the historical situation is different but the results are much the same: the guards gradually come to abuse their privilege of power (or at least one them does); the prisoners begin to show signs of stress, with some rebelling and some acquiescing (and one schizophrenically doing both); and the experiment dissolves in under a week. In this historical mise-en-abyme (a re-enactment of a historical moment that re-enacts, for scientific purposes, a history of imprisonment, which is itself repeated daily) human dignity falls prey to the temptations of power, which indignifies those who have it as much as those stripped bare by it. Although the participants quickly acquiesce to roles that seem historically ingrained, in this version of the experiment self-contemplation wins the day, as the increasingly power-hungry 'warden' pulls the plug on his own behaviour by gathering the prisoners and guards together to discuss the meaning of dignity.
No such self-contemplation seems possible in Them (2007), which sets the scene for conflict and even violence by staging an anything-goes art workshop with representatives of four different Polish ideological factions—'elderly Catholic ladies, members of the neo-nationalist Union of Polish Youths, Jewish teenagers, and young left-wing activists'.14 In this film, the art object is the site of action: the groups are invited to make posters symbolising their beliefs and then 'improve' each other's posters in response. Paint and scissors and flame soon become material forms of antagonistic expression as the groups increasingly turn to committing violence, first on the artworks and then on each other (they even take scissors to one another's T-shirts while they are still wearing them). What becomes powerfully clear in this film is the extent to which all strong ideologies tend to violence, as actions become an extension of art and words. Ironically, it's the left-wing activists, who preach tolerance, who seem responsible for each escalation, until one of the activist girls sets fire to the Polish Youths' symbolic sword and everybody runs for cover. The film ends with slow footage of the detritus left behind by this putative 'meeting of minds'.
For Zmijewski, the point of art is not really to provoke; rather, it must reclaim its ability to offer knowledge, and this for him is inevitably political. But here the controversy about his work begins, for what are the politics of someone who re-tattoos a concentration-camp number on an old man's arm, or puts volunteers in prison for twenty-five dollars a day, or films the quiet spectacle of two sufferers of Huntington's chorea out for a walk? Zmijewski carefully avoids simple political statements, but he does offer clues to the complexity of his political position: 'Looking at a situation from another side or going against the grain reaffirms people's need to doubt. And doubting protects us against manipulation, indoctrination, propaganda, and the temptations of power.'15 Such doubt is affirmed again and again in the situations Zmijewski devises, as in Repetition, which ends with unexpected post-experiment footage of the ex-prisoners accusing the most outspoken in their midst of brown nosing, and an interview with the 'prison warden' six months after the experiment, which shows him to be still troubled by what he became under the influence of power. Social signification or given positions are thus opened up for questioning, and notions of human dignity—in the sense of prescribed social purpose, value, and meaning—are repeatedly pushed into uncomfortable contact with indignity; shame and embarrassment (ours even more than the participants'). We struggle with our wish to be politically correct or, failing that, at least to find some redemptive meaning in the situations. But it is precisely the taken-for-granted trajectory of social purpose that Zmijewski throws open to doubt, not in a dramatic arc but in the small, trivial gestures of the everyday, the little actions that lack evident meaning. Indeed, one of the most striking things about Zmijewski's later work is the extent to which he dares engage our boredom in the films. Boredom, on the one hand, expresses the anthropological impetus of Zmijewski's documentarism, but on the other, in its relation to a lack of evident meaning or purpose, it is also the grounds for much of what is political about his work. This is particularly true of Zmijewski's recent collection of ten films, each of which painstakingly documents twenty-four hours in the life of a manual labourer in Poland, Berlin, Sicily, or Juarez, Mexico (2006-7). The boredom in these films is both theirs and ours. In the repetitive tasks these people perform at work and at home, we see them become dissociated from ideas of dignity and purposefulness—say, in footage of Danuta checking the labels on bottles in a vodka plant or Dorota passing supermarket items over the barcode reader at her checkout stall. At the same time, however, the films are so richly detailed and individuated as to engage a level of reality that would otherwise remain invisible, precisely because of its purposelessness. Zmijewski's attentive camera uncovers, in Giorgio Agamben's phrase, 'bare life', or mere bodies engaged in repetitive action, thereby throwing the social value of work into question.16 This tension between dignity and indignity, between meaningful resistance and purposeless materiality, lies at the core of Zmijewski's projects. His work has been compared, for good reason, with Big Brother, since he similarly devises a situation, puts subjects into it, and lets the camera roll as a mix of the predictable and unpredictable occurs. Although accusations of indignity and boredom are also favourite barbs in the anti-reality-TV critical arsenal, I would argue that Zmijewski's work suggests what can be productive about both. Boredom in reality TV, à la the 24/7 camera of Big Brother, is a protest of the body against a given social purpose, and the indignity of self-exhibition is a way in which bodies reveal people to themselves as well as to viewers. Following this entwined logic of surveillance and mundanity, which is also the logic of reality TV, Zmijewski has likened himself to a TV producer who works for himself rather than for a boss.17 But the crux of the similarity lies deeper: however repetitive and dull our movements or our lives, we generate meaning out of these small, insignificant gestures. Rather than drawing a line between art and reality, then, Zmijewski's work shows what both reality TV and art know: 'Reality itself is acted out, truth is a construct, and the only way we can exist for others is by playing ourselves.'18 Should this, just for a moment, cause you to doubt your own purposefulness, then so much the better.
1. Artur Zmijewski, 'A Favorite Theory of Art', tr. Mazena B. Guzowska, excerpted in Artur Zmijewski: If It Happened Only Once It's As If It Never Happened, ed. Joanna Mytkowska (Warsaw: Zacheta National Gallery of Art, 2005), 158.
2. Ibid., 157.
3 'A Storehouse of Limbs', Artur Zmijewski interviewed by Katarzyna Bielas and Dorota Jarecka, in Artur Zmijewski: If It Happened Only Once It's As If It Never Happened, 85.
4. See Artur Zmijewski, 'The Applied Social Arts', in Artur Zmijewski: Ausgewählte Arbeiten / Selected Works, ed. Katrin Becker (Berlin: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and Revolver Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, 2007), 143–58.
5. For more on the fantasy of the artist, see 'Stripping off the Fantasy', Artur Zmijewski interviewed by Sebastian Cichocki, in Artur Zmijewski: Ausgewählte Arbeiten / Selected Works, 81–93.
6. 'A Storehouse of Limbs', 83.
7. Ibid., 81.
8. Jan Verwoert, 'Game Theory', Frieze, 114 (April 2008), 164.
9. Artur Zmijewski: If It Happened Only Once It's As If It Never Happened, 176.
10. 'Stripping off the Fantasy', 85–6.
11. Compare 'A Storehouse of Limbs', 79, where Zmijewski says, 'It is the healthy who are reduced to the role of a limb storehouse in the film.'
12. Sebastian Cichocki, 'The Pathology of Power and the Administration of Humiliation: Professor Zimbardo's Experiment (Repetition)', in Artur Zmijewski: If It Happened Only Once It's As If It Never Happened, 43.
13. Joanna Mytkowska, 'Too-True Scenarios', in Artur Zmijewski: If It Happened Only Once It's As If It Never Happened, 12.
14. Jan Verwoert, 166.
15. 'A Storehouse of Limbs', 80.
16. For another perspective on the 'bare life' of Zmijewski's subjects, see Jan Verwoert.
17. 'A Storehouse of Limbs', 82.
18. 'A Stream of Thinking Images', Artur Zmijewski interviewed by Roma Piotrowska and Maks Bochenek, in Artur Zmijewski: Ausgewählte Arbeiten / Selected Works, 27.