Communicating Vessels
with: Semâ
Bekirovic, Matthijs Bosman, Karolina Breguła, Matthew Buckingham,
Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčova, VALIE EXPORT, Anya
Gallaccio, Lotte Geeven, Agata Ingarden, Beili Liu, Dane Mitchell,
Jacek Tylicki, Barbara Visser
Curated by Anna Lebensztejn, Kinga Olesiejuk
Coordination: Dorota Bucka
16 December 2017 - 18 March 2018
Bunkier
Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art
Szczepański Square 3A, 31-011 Cracow, Poland
Szczepański Square 3A, 31-011 Cracow, Poland
Photo credit: Studio FilmLOVE
At
the turn of the fifties and sixties Gustav Metzger developed, in
a series of manifestos, the concept of auto-destructive art,
supposed to become the social form of artistic activity in the
post-industrial era. In his practice he was translating it into acts
of annihilation of artistic objects, taking advantage of deficiencies
of media, mechanical force and caustics in doing so. As the artist
suggested, “Auto-destructive art is art which contains within
itself an agent which automatically leads to its destruction within a
period of time not to exceed twenty years. Other forms of
auto-destructive art involve manual manipulation. There are forms of
auto-destructive art where the artist has a tight control over the
nature and timing of disintegrative process, and there are other
forms where the artist’s control is slight.1”
It was not long before the concept of auto-destruction merged, in the
author’s perception, with auto-creation of works: “Auto-creative
art is art of change, growth, movement.2”
Nearly a decade after Metzger’s notions John Baldessari put forth,
as the next work of his own, cremation of his artistic output to
date. At once he emphasized, to an extreme extent and most
accurately, the creative aspect of destruction.
According to philosopher Alain Badiou, destruction constitutes one of the aspects of the phenomenon of negation, precisely that which has a negative nature indeed.3 The other factor, opposite and complementing it, is subtraction. Destruction, here, means action intended to tear down the established order, which controls how certain areas of reality are created and perceived, as well as to eradicate its physical manifestations. Such destructive acts at the same time herald a reorganization of realities, effected—as the negated features are subtracted—outside the laws governing former states of affairs. Damage, therefore, carries with itself a promise of creation, for a complete concept of negation covers both the destruction and the creative subtraction that follows.
Artists,
today, are not avoiding the use of materials likely to disintegrate
by nature—they do arrange situations that cause damage to, or
accelerate the decay of an object. Not many of them, however, embark
upon as radical activities as Baldessari or Metzger have undertaken,
welcoming a total annihilation of their works. Few allow for a
progressing or partial destruction of original productions, and
whoever does so evidently stresses their past presence by way of
documentation or remains meant to represent the pieces at
exhibitions. Looped processes aimed at auto-destruction of physical
objects are more common—such artworks last in change, disappearance
and return.
The production of contemporary art assumes its continued reproduction. This strategy corresponds to Badiou’s observations, for in his view, the current century is a time of creative, and not destructive negation. Artists who follow the direction of art not focused on permanent artefacts do not necessarily celebrate the incorporeality or gradual passing of their works. Fading augurs well, above all else, for reappearance; loss, for compensation or new creative circumstances. What is subject to transformation or dying out, comes back around, at times in an altered state, shape or location. This resembles the functioning of a closed system, where a balance is maintained despite continual shifts.
Communicating
Vessels
revolve
around objects and installations constructed as either proceeding
transformations or series of events. These operate at the border of
physical and non-physical dimensions of art; the conceptual plane,
which determines the laws regulating their existence, is of no less
importance to them than the expressive corporeal aspect. The latter
is designed to be destabilized because of compositions’ structural
properties or under external factors affecting them. The peculiarity
of process-oriented works is comparable with the behavior of liquids
contained in a communicating vessel system:
transformation-susceptible matter circulates and takes forms
different from the initial ones while their nature stands unchanged.
Shifts inside the system are an effect of the dynamics a given
substance demonstrates as well as a result of environmental or
human elements’ impact. In consequence an array of interconnections
is formed where various factors may prevail, including the work
itself and its immediate surroundings, the creator’s
gesture,
and the viewer’s decisions.
Gunge that smells of burnt sugar, clouds of vapor, the odor of decomposing plants, heat accelerating the decay of photographic emulsion… Process-oriented works of art, although dealing mostly with the problems of loss and disappearance, are deeply rooted in the physicality of employed matter. Artists probe the limits of materials’ strength, bringing them to extreme states, and initiate processes that lead to their eventual disintegration. They do so utilizing both the inherent impermanence of a given medium and its susceptibility to damage caused by the environment. They create objects that may endanger any items exhibited nearby. Unveiling the material tissue of artworks, authors at once release stimuli that arouse the sensuality of cognition. Wear and destruction of matter enhance the impressions’ intensity, setting off the carnal awareness of existence.
A
coconut fibre floor mat with the following words printed on it:
“BEYOND THIS POINT INVISIBLE FORCES ARE AT PLAY”.
The
vaporised homoeopathic solution’s essence is water taken from the
Maeander (now Büyük Menderes) river in Asia Minor. Its mouth, into
the Aegean Sea, is where the ancient Ionian city of Miletus was
located, home of philosopher Thales (ca 624–546 BC), who regarded
water as the first principle and origin of all things (arche).
The
artist cast the objects in burnt caramel which set on steel strips
and small brass wires.
Displayed
continuously and fading, the slide depicts a monument to
Absalon, the controversial 12th-century
bishop and legendary founder of Copenhagen. Famous for being
exceptionally cultured and intelligent, at the same time he set
himself apart with unusual brutality when commanding military
expeditions against pagans. He also commissioned the first written
history of Denmark, which only sheds light on the brighter side of
his accomplishments.
Courtesy
of Daniel Marzona and the Artist.
Steel
rods with light bulbs attached to their ends plunge, in repetitive
mechanical motion, into glass cylinders filled with various liquids:
milk, water and used engine oil.
Work
from the collection of MWW
– Wrocław Contemporary Museum.
Five
hundred Gerbera
flowers of the “Beauty” variety—now hardly ever grown but once
valued for its visual qualities—steadily transform in time and
subject to the exhibition’s environment, affected by such factors
as light, heat, moisture and bacteria.
Work
from the British Council Collection
Process-oriented
artistic projects raise questions of who is behind the contrived
situation and to what extent it is acceptable. By doing so they make
the artist the centre of attention. The strategies for working with
unstable matter he or she pursues determine the work’s living
rhythm: they define a narrower or wider scope within which to
interact with it freely, and assume a less or more significant
effect on its further existence. The author’s decisions may consist
in just indicating arbitrarily the ideal physical state of an object,
making one aware what power lies with an artistic gesture. The
opposite situation is possible too, when the artist, having initiated
a certain process, at some point withdraws from steering its
course. Waiving his or her right to control of the matter, the
creator puts it at the mercy of chance, nature or another human
being. He or she then makes do with the final result or entirely
gives up the keeping track of what happens to the piece, which may,
as a consequence, take forms the author never expected.
Regardless
of how strictly or not the artist controls his or her work, the
problem of artistic manipulation emerges, that of distortions
affecting how process-oriented art objects are experienced. Some of
these create an illusion of involvement, deluding with an opportunity
to influence their future—but looking back on that some time later,
it may turn out it is the author who has been pulling strings all
along.
The
work in a way documents the Natural
Art
project initiated by the artist in 1973. In a process triggered by
the author, canvases or sheets of paper were left exposed to
environmental factors in different parts of the world, including
Poland, Sweden, the US and Oceania. The double-faced original Nature
No. 367
is a record of nature’s forces made in 1979 in Iceland.
Work
from the collection of Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art in
Kraków, acquired as part of the task “Boundaries of Collection.
Growth of the Bunkier Sztuki collection”, co-financed with funds of
the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
The
video Herbarium
was shot inside an abandoned tropical greenhouse located near one of
the largest botanical gardens in the Netherlands, that is Arboretum
Belmonte in Wageningen.
Courtesy
of Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam.
The
artist subjected photographs of galaxies to partial photochemical
treatment: developed but not fixed, they remain sensitive to light.
Their display is only possible in a space illuminated with red light,
under conditions similar to those created in a photographer’s
darkroom.
Works
employing the creative potential that lies in change often await the
viewer’s cooperation. He or she plays an important role in their
life cycle, being able to influence the dynamics of transformation
and so bring about an alteration, distortion or wear of the artwork’s
physical form. In many instances, faced with the choice between
destroying a piece and leaving it intact, he or she unsuspectingly
fulfills a predetermined course of events; elsewhere, successive
stages of the work’s development are triggered off by him- or
herself deliberately. The viewer’s figure takes a peculiar shape in
the light of any narrative-oriented piece, becoming not only a
carrier of the given account but also a contributor, expected to
introduce an original element in order to advance its evolution into
quite a different story.
An
installation made of coils of red wool, inspired by an ancient
Chinese myth saying that people, when born, are joined with their
soul mates by invisible red threads, and that it is these links which
allow them to finally find each other despite any adversities.
The
composition is arranged anew for each presentation, with the artist’s
participation, so that it is adapted to the volume and architecture
of the given exhibition space.
The
starting point for the work was an invitation to participate in the
International Sculpture and Painting Symposium Dakar Senegal. Its
organisers’ formal requirements aroused the artists’
suspicions—they were expected to have their selected works sent to
Dakar as well as to pay registration fees of a considerable amount.
So, the artists launched an investigation: before the dispatch they
fitted the pieces with a GPS transmitter, which was to lead them to
Senegal’s capital indeed. But then, asking around the town’s
inhabitants, local artists and even fortune-tellers about the missing
works turned outto be of no avail. Semâ and Lotte’s Senegalese
guide Omar eventually mentioned to them the griots, West African
bards who orally pass down stories from generation to generation. At
the artists’ request, Omar was supposed to visit his home village
griot and ask him to compose a song for Dakar’s lost
collection.
Material
for a new version of the tale—originally invented in 2006 for the
Short
Stories
show in Amsterdam’s W139 gallery—consisted of accounts collected
during a few days’ residency in Kraków. Once unleashed by the
author, the anecdote is incidentally passed on to subsequent
listeners.
Anetta Mona Chişa
& Lucia Tkáčova, Far
from You. Memorial
to Lida Clementisova #16,
2009, installation
The
project invokes an almost forgotten Czech opera singer, wife to
Vladimir Clementis—Slovak opposition politician and victim of
Stalinist era purge in 1950s. Having shared with her husband the
tragedy of imprisonment and torture, Lida devoted the rest of her
life to immortalising Vladimir’s services for democracy; she has
not entered the collective memory herself.
Memorials
designed by the artists subtly give back the heroine her due place in
history. One of these variations consisted in planting species of
Clematis
around monuments existing in the public space; another, in creating,
out of letters the couple exchanged when imprisoned, a musical score
to be performed by the viewer. Memorial bearing the number 16 is
reconstructed based on a photographic portrait of Lida made in her
emigration period.
The
piece alludes to the destruction of Martin Kippenberger’s
installation When
It Starts Dripping from the Ceiling:
on show in 2011 at the Museum Ostwall in Dortmund, it was damaged by
the cleaning lady who removed planned residue from one of its parts.
The museum has not commented much on that irreplaceable loss. It is
worth noting that this unit is run in line with Alexander Dorner’s
theory that institutions should operate like dynamic power
plants—generate buoyant energy indispensable for responding to
changes in the social order.
Work
from the collection of Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art in
Kraków, acquired as part of the task “Boundaries of Collection.
Growth of the Bunkier Sztuki collection”, co-financed with funds of
the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
___________________
___________________
1
Gustav
Metzger, Manifesto
Auto-Destructive
in
Destruction,
ed.
S. Spieker
(Whitechapel Gallery: London, The MIT Press: Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 2017), 88.
2 Idem,
Auto-Destructive Art
Machine Art Auto-Creative in
Destruction, op. cit.,
88.
3 See
Alain Badiou, Destruction,
Negation, Subtraction
in The Scandal of
Self-Contradiction: Pasolini’s Multistable Subjectivities,
Traditions, Geographies,
ed. L. di Blasi,
M. Gragnolati, Ch.F.E. Holzhey (Vienna/Berlin, 2012),
269–271.
Communicating
Vessels revolve around objects and installations constructed as
either processes or events. They do not entirely belong to the
non-material domain, nor do they fit the stereotypical image of a
fixed piece of art. Life cycles of such works are dependent on
properties of fragile and volatile substances as well as on external
factors affecting them. Still, their passing and change do not mean
loss, for depletion, decay and death are followed by growth,
restoration and rebirth.
The
exhibition’s title draws on the mechanisms of physics, which become
a point of reference when depicting the characteristics of
process-oriented artworks. These, making use of materials susceptible
to transformations, act like liquids contained in communicating
vessel systems: under certain circumstances their matter
begins to circulate, takes forms different from the original ones,
yet their essence remains unchanged. Shifts inside the system result
from a bundle of factors, and relationships are established on many
levels: both within one piece, with its specific physical qualities,
and where the work interfaces with its environment, viewers,
creators, or with other pieces.
Intensity
of flows is most apparent in works made of impermanent substances,
where change is due to their inherent features and outside influence.
Such pieces fulfill various strategies of interaction with unstable
matter, either being subjected to the laws of physicality or
overcoming them. Some works fade, which is observable in the shorter
or longer run. Several hundred blood-red Gerbera flowers constituting
Anya Gallaccio’s Preserve ‘Beauty’ slowly wither and pale. The
mythical Copenhagen’s founder’s likeness displayed by Matthew
Buckingham burns out gradually (Image of Absalon to Be Projected
Until It Vanishes). Dane Mitchell’s installation All Whatness Is
Wetness, based on evaporation of water and on the rules of
homoeopathy, affects caramel-made sculptures by Agata Ingarden: by
plasticising them it entails the risk of their transformation. But to
transition into another state is never an irretrievable loss; rather,
it is just a stage in the works’ cycle of disappearance and return
symbolically commented on by VALIE EXPORT’s Fragmente der Bilder
einer Berührung, an installation looped in mechanically repetitive
motion.
Central
to designing the living rhythm of a work is the author’s figure.
His or her decisions may come down to suspending a process in order
to make us aware what power lies with an artistic gesture. It happens
so in Semâ Bekirovic’s installation Unfixed Galaxies,
presenting photographs of the universe, not fixed, in the dim red
light of a darkroom. The opposite situation is possible too, as
suggested by the piece Nature No.367 – Genesis by Jacek Tylicki,
where the author waives his right to control of the matter and
instead puts it at nature’s mercy. Regardless of the extent to
which results are controlled, artistic manipulations emerge—after
all, someone must have pulled the strings for the show to go on.
Communicating
Vessels also highlight the viewer’s part in developing the
processes that take place in artworks. This concerns projects as
dependent on human behaviour as an anecdote passed on incidentally
(Matthijs Bosman, Anecdote), a tempting snack (Karolina Breguła,
Kippenberger Cookies) or make-up put on as per pattern (Anetta Mona
Chişa & Lucia Tkáčova, Memorial to Lida Clementisova #16). The
unique bonds formed with such pieces are captured metaphorically in
Beili Liu’s installation from the Lure series, invoking the ancient
Chinese belief that people, when born, are joined with their soul
mates by invisible red threads, and that it is these links which
allow them to finally find each other despite any adversities.
Communicating
Vessels let the audience explore a space where one work after
another—each employing transfigurations of artistic means or
producing situations that actively involve the viewer—sets off the
carnal awareness of existence. It is an exhibition in process, one to
be revisited in different moments so as to follow the trail marked by
the passing of works and their rebirth in new shapes, states and
locations.
The
works Kippenberger Cookies by Karolina Breguła and Nature No.367 –
Genesis by Jacek Tylicki have been acquired for the collection of the
Bunkier Sztuki Gallery as part of the project “Boundaries of
Collection. Growth of the Bunkier Sztuki collection”, co-financed
with funds of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
The
exhibition is part of the project “Beyond the Zero Point.
Contemporary Art and Its Appearances”, co-financed by the Mondriaan
Fund.