Neither East nor West, Neither North nor South.

Bożena Czubak: In one of your most recent works—Everything Buzzes Except What Gurgles. Exercises in Declension—you ‘show’ the gurgling of the media by using electronic displays. You subject the same words scrolling across the displays to grammatical analysis. On several dozen boards, the individual words are methodically declined through every grammatical case. To what extent is this grammatical logic an attempt to master the media’s babble, and to what extent is it a rhetorical device—that is, one reinforcing the rhetoric of words that not only scroll continually across the displays but are also repeated in every possible case?

Jarosław Kozłowski: Both aspects are important in this work: on the one hand, the chaos of an aggressive excess of words on the displays; on the other, an order concerning the pragmatics of using those words, which destroys their meaning.
In this instance, words declined through cases lose their meaning still further and become absurd, intensifying the incoherence of what appears on the displays. The German-English version of this work, which I recently showed in Berlin, was deprived of this double dismantling of meanings. Because German lacks an analogous declension and English lacks declension altogether, I used only the displays. For a long time, I wondered whether to show it outside Poland at all, in a different linguistic context. First, because of the differing rhetorics of political and media vocabularies in different countries. Second, because of the differences between the grammatical rules of individual languages. Polish is one of the languages with an elaborate declension of nouns.

B.C.: How did the work you showed in Berlin as part of René Block’s exhibition Unanswered Question come about? The Polish version contains words familiar from our media babble. How did you select the words associated with the ‘chatter’ of the German media?

J.K.: Some of the concepts I used in the Polish version have equivalents in German or British media and political reality. But I collected most of them from acquaintances living in those realities: people who read those newspapers, listen to the news, watch television and use those languages every day. I defined my expectations—as in the Polish version, I wanted words overused in contexts to which they do not belong. From the words I received, I selected those that seemed most appropriate to the work’s idea. The Berlin version is now in Istanbul, where it will be supplemented by analogous words in Turkish.

B.C.: There was no declension in Berlin, but it ‘gurgled’ more loudly. The Polish version was presented in gallery spaces; the Berlin version, installed in a large window at the Neue Berliner Kunstverein, ‘went out into the street’.
J.K.: It worked very well because, by entering public space, the buzzing blended with everyday reality.

B.C.: You had previously used displays installed in public space, for example in the 2006 exhibition Art, Life and Confusion in Belgrade. Except that there you used an entirely different strategy—the erasure of information.
J.K.: That work consisted in negating any kind of message. It concerned the disappearance of something that forms an important element of our recognition of the world: information and current news. Displays installed in public spaces, institutions, shops and streets emitted the short statement NO NEWS FROM…, repeated together with the names of twenty-three capitals important to global politics and economics. In Everything Buzzes Except What Gurgles, I reversed the situation—there is an excess of words and concepts, which turn into babble. As a result, they lose any communicative capacity and thus contradict the fundamental function of language, becoming non-language.
B.C.: Language was a key category in your earlier artistic practice. Luiza Nader wrote about your art from the perspective of language as its central concern¹. How would you compare your attitude towards language at the time when, for example, Grammar (a 1973 book) was made with the way you think about language now?

J.K.: The language games I used in works from the 1970s chiefly concerned the relationship of language to reality and vice versa. They contained no direct references to the political context, although that context naturally existed. What mattered more was the play between language and reality, a game employing rules of logic that functioned as tools for examining the relationship between simple sentences speaking about reality and reality itself. I think language remains the principal element of my works, including those that do not operate directly with it. I realised that structures proper to language can also be transferred to what is not regarded as linguistic expression—for example, objects. Objects can be used to construct sentences and subjected to the same operations as words. The difference you ask about lies chiefly in the fact that earlier I was decidedly more interested in looking for holes and paradoxes between reality and language. Reality itself is now so paradoxical that it is enough to expose its assorted deviations—for example, abuses of words—to show them on displays and relate them to what was proper to my earlier thinking about language, such as grammatical rules, which emphatically reveal the conceptual and semantic incompatibility of language with reality.

B.C.: Looking back at what you did in earlier decades, one has the impression that the language you used then meant a great deal more.
J.K.: The language we once spoke meant a great deal more. Individual words were used more carefully and usually in contexts proper to them. Over time, linguistic abuses and the cynical depreciation of meanings and senses meant that words which carried content thirty or forty years ago were deprived of it and became empty. They express nothing and convey not even any information, like the NO NEWS FROM… repeated on the displays. Language no longer ‘catches’ reality; it has become indifferent, absolved of responsibility.

B.C.: Recycled News likewise concerns the media’s failure to ‘catch’ reality and the disappearance of the message. At the exhibition in Atlas Sztuki, this work will be juxtaposed with the installation Everything Buzzes Except What Gurgles.
J.K.: Both works address a similar problem. Recycled News is more explicitly connected with the media and newspapers, which are largely responsible for our perception and awareness of the world. After all, the overwhelming majority of our knowledge about what happens comes from newspapers, news reports and television. There are two Recycled News series. The first comments on media reality and, at the same time, on art. It actually arose by accident. While painting the Curtains series—large watercolours on paper that caused the paint to run profusely—I used newspapers to protect the floor. The running paint covered almost the entire newspaper. I then realised that I had the material for another work. It was enough to lift the newspapers from the floor; they had already been degraded, deprived of their original function and reduced to a purely utilitarian status. I began playing with different painterly conventions on them, developing and aestheticising the individual pages. From carriers of information, the newspapers became fields for a painterly game into which I incorporated various styles of painting popular in twentieth-century and contemporary art. This produced a very large group of works that can be related equally to media reality and to art—its function, procedures and reliability. On the one hand, there would be an aestheticisation of something containing news about assorted social and political events around the world; on the other, a politicisation of something that pretends to be autonomous and independent of that world. The second Recycled News series is more austere. The newspapers I use had previously served only as carriers of information—admittedly information that was already out of date, concerning events from several days, a month, a year or even several years earlier. I apply a simple principle of painting over the text and the photographs illustrating it while respecting certain aesthetic principles in the act of painting over. These are, however, very minimalist interventions, revealing only that the surface upon which a monochromatic layer of watercolour paint has been placed is a newspaper’s surface.

B.C.: In the first version, in which you multiplied different painterly styles, you offered viewers assorted conventions and drew them into a game—or, in fact, a kind of trap of aesthetic games.
In the second version, with newspaper pages painted over flatly and uniformly and framed behind glass, you offer viewers their own reflections. Here we encounter what you once called the ‘hypocrisy of the picture’, which shows nothing and at most conceals. Except that here it is also the hypocrisy of newspapers and the media.

J.K.: These reflections form part of the game that I had earlier used very consciously in the Curtains, which referred to various undesirable vices of life. In Recycled News, this too is an important element of the game: incorporating recipients into the picture and condemning them to recognise their own reflection, their assumed image within the picture, because those reflections are, after all, an illusion. Of course, we cannot see ourselves in every newspaper because some hang too high. The fact that they reflect something they are not and absorb that illusion, while themselves being an illusion—that is, painted-over newspapers pretending to be something else—activates what I call the ‘hypocrisy of pictures’. For their role essentially consists in covering the wall and diverting attention from reality.

B.C.: On several occasions, in different exhibitions I curated, I had an opportunity to present works from Recycled News. The question of colours was often raised: the criterion for choosing them—for example, why Le Monde is blue while Le Figaro is white. People also asked about the principles governing the geometry of the edges of the painted-over areas.

J.K.: As far as colours are concerned, their selection is entirely arbitrary. As a rule, I avoid stereotypical associations—for example, that a Russian newspaper should be red and a Vatican one blue. The colours result from mixing paints in a cup, and I mix a great many in order to avoid repeating colours, which is not simple given the number of newspapers I have already painted over. It would be impossible to attribute any meaning to the colours. The same is true of the geometry at the edges of the painted-over areas. Those decisions are likewise entirely arbitrary and entail nothing. In the 1990s, I made several large drawings entitled Simple Geometry, whose geometry was likewise apparent. It amounted to the use of several simple geometric figures which, because of assorted ‘disturbances’, contradicted any order or logic. It was more a game with geometry, similar to my earlier games with language. The geometric edges of the newspapers’ painted-over areas probably contain a certain aesthetic quality, just like everything that assumes visual form.

B.C.: Works from Recycled News, placed in identical frames, stretch in rows along the walls at exhibitions, forming an exceptionally decorative panel.
J.K.: When hanging the works, I pay attention to harmonious arrangements of colour. Yet this is a rhetorical device, performing a function analogous to that of the references to fashionable painting styles in the first Recycled News series.

In this instance, it is also ironic because it refers to something devoid of any meaning. Newspapers—regardless of their country of origin, political orientation or the importance of their titles—are hung beside one another in a simple order of colour ranges.
B.C.: In earlier works, you used newspapers without subjecting them to such ruthless aestheticisation.
J.K.: Because I used them for different reasons. I first used newspapers in a 1967 work, Arrangement, shown at the odNowa Gallery in Poznań. Daily newspapers appeared there among many other objects incompatible with contemporary notions of art, in one of the display cases, as a quotation from everyday reality. This proved an unexpected provocation and prompted a fairly spontaneous reaction from the audience, who destroyed the entire exhibition. B.C.: Newspapers also appeared in the 1969 Containers, which we recently showed in Turin.
J.K.: It turns out that newspapers have accompanied my artistic practice almost from the beginning. I cannot stand them, but I read them every day. Although they annoy and irritate me, I buy and read them daily.
B.C.: Newspapers also play a highly significant role in Soft Protections, a series begun in 1994 and continued to this day. You realised the latest installation in this series in Vienna two years ago.
J.K.: In Soft Protections, newspapers were used sarcastically, as a means of balancing reality. I constructed objects by combining, for example, two chairs sawn in half into one, or two bisected wardrobes into a single wardrobe, so that their parts were incompatible and their equilibrium unstable. Newspapers placed under the shorter legs supported the precarious balance, produced an illusion of stability and protected the constructions from falling. Each time, I used the local press connected with the place where I was making another version of Soft Protections. When I realised the penultimate, Russian version as part of the New Décor exhibition at Garage in Moscow (Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture—B.C.’s note) in 2010, I placed a stack of newspapers bought at a kiosk beneath a tall, several-metre construction assembled from chairs and tables in order to maintain its equilibrium. The day before the opening, a member of the gallery staff asked whether he could replace one of the newspapers. I was surprised and did not know what he meant. It turned out that under one leg of a table forming a load-bearing element of the entire construction, I had placed a newspaper carrying a photograph of Roman Abramovich, whose partner owns the gallery. Fearing this might offend the oligarch, they struggled for two hours to turn the newspaper over.
B.C.: In Soft Protections—the museum version (1994), which I remember from the large Europe. Europe exhibition in Bonn—you used the art press, various magazines mediating art’s reception.
J.K.: That was the only occasion when I replaced daily newspapers with the art press. It resulted from the fact that the work was shown in a museum as part of a highly prestigious exhibition. In that context, magazines such as Flash Art, Artforum and Kunstforum constituted a much more eloquent ‘soft protection’, which in that instance concerned maintaining a safe order and equilibrium in the art world.
B.C.: For you, the media chiefly means newspapers, although I remember a project we discussed more than a dozen years ago that could not be realised then for financial reasons. It was to be a gigantic wall of several dozen television screens broadcasting advertisements simultaneously.
J.K.: I realised a rudimentary form of that work in Oldenburg (2000), entitling it Contemporary Art Collection. New Acquisitions. Like the Bonn installation, it was a commentary referring more to art than to reality. But the work is still awaiting its realisation; as conceived, it would consist of more than 120 monitors. That is how many four-hour tapes I have containing advertisements recorded from around the world.
B.C.: Recycled News is also a gigantic undertaking, comprising hundreds of works whose number continues to grow. How many of these watercolours are there?

J.K.: Around 2,000 watercolours and some 150 newspaper titles. But there is still a great deal to do; I have already prepared a fairly large batch of further newspapers for the near future.
B.C.: You already have such large, multi-element works dating back to the 1970s to your name—for example, Collection (1970–1971).

J.K.: I worked on Collection for almost two years and exhausted every variant of constructing and decomposing a square with a diagonal. More than 8,000 combinations in sequences of small drawings, 2 cm x 2 cm. Drawing beside drawing, they covered a surface 340 cm high extending for thirty-six metres. I then made An Apparatus (1972), comprising twenty-seven boards with 1,296 contact prints documenting a camera’s technical possibilities, accompanied by lists giving detailed parameters for making each photograph.

B.C.: Both Collection and An Apparatus are finished, closed works. Recycled News is, one might say, an open work. You like working in cycles, processing different strands through series of works. Yet Recycled News is almost a kind of diary in which you paint over what you have read.
J.K.: If I do not paint over the newspapers for an extended period, I feel uncomfortable. In a sense I take revenge on them, and I need it for my own equilibrium. Besides, newspapers appear every day, and I continually discover new ones I have not yet painted over. When I am at an airport and see a newspaper I have not held before, I buy it immediately. One can also find plenty of abandoned newspapers at airports.

B.C.: You once painted over books; in the mid-1990s you made two installations from them: Reading Room (1994) and Library (1995).
J.K.: It was not a very pleasant experience, even though the books were destined to be pulped. I have immense respect and affection for books, as can be seen from my flat, which is filled with them. Reading Room and Library were a kind of reflection on the state of contemporary culture and the progressive degradation of intellectual values, thought, imagination and memory. I acquired the books from second-hand bookshops in Oslo, where selections are made from time to time and those that are in the way because no one buys them are sent for pulping. In this manner, I collected around 500 volumes, which I painted white page by page—a truly Benedictine labour.

B.C.: In the 1970s you distanced yourself quite ostentatiously from politics; the works you show now concern the media—one might say politics par excellence.
J.K.: I was highly principled in defining art’s autonomy, which was essential at the time because of the total and ubiquitous politicisation of everyday life, including art and culture. Whatever we did could be—and often was—interpreted in political terms. Autonomy was necessary in order to position oneself critically outside, without becoming a spokesman, agitator or compliant instrument of particular ideological formations; to speak from a distance, avoiding entanglement, about what affected us and the mechanisms of assorted entanglements. I treated the autonomy of artistic expression as a kind of preliminary condition necessary for defining the field of my own freedom, and only after more than a dozen years did I authorise myself to speak about what we call the political. I later found a similar reflection in Pierre Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art, where he justifies the importance of autonomy in a comparable way. In the 1970s, none of this was so simple, because even adopting an autonomous position proved to be a political act. The idea of NET, for example, arose from the conviction that direct exchange between artists, without the mediation of any institution, was an activity situated in the autonomous sphere. Contrary to my intentions, however, NET was incorporated into politics and interpreted in such terms as anti-institutional and anti-systemic action. I think I am now more conscious of such traps connected with addressing political questions.

B.C.: The 1970s were accompanied by a conviction that alternative activity was possible; NET was intended as a kind of alternative to the ideologisation of culture. At the Akumulatory 2 Gallery, which you ran, you emphasised the significance of privacy as an alternative to ideologised, official spaces in which art operated. Today, however, maintaining this division between private and public is increasingly difficult.

J.K.: The distinction between private and public already seems unreal. After all, public space is formed by our private spheres, while the public intrudes uncontrollably into our privacy. The division appears purely conventional.
B.C.: Just as aesthetics cannot be separated from politics, as you demonstrate in Recycled News.

J.K.: They permeate one another, because does aesthetics exist outside politics? Can boundaries be drawn that would categorically separate aesthetics from politics? Consider still life, the most academic motif, which—whether we wish it or not—expresses particular views of art and its social function and is therefore likewise saturated with ideology. Unfortunately, politics cannot be avoided in aesthetics. No colour is neutral and devoid of political connotations. When, during martial law, I constructed Green Wall outside Political Context (1982) at the Akumulatory 2 Gallery in Poznań, the censors classified it as a mocking action insulting the system. A year later, at Galerie Vor Ort in Hamburg, it was received as an expression of my sympathy for the Green Party. Later, in order to avoid such simple references, I made Grey Wall outside Political Context for the Rhetorical Image exhibition (1990) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. And I read in a newspaper (The Village Voice) that it was a pessimistic image of the grey reality of a country behind the Iron Curtain… Politics infiltrates aesthetics, just as aesthetics infiltrates politics.

B.C.: With its programmatic arbitrariness in the choice of colours, Recycled News takes the expectation of any legible relationships to the point of absurdity.
J.K.: Here it really is impossible to find any key that would allow one to discover relationships or categories: right or left, East–West or North–South. As recently became apparent, I had already regarded such divisions with great suspicion. A few weeks ago, while searching for materials from the 1970s, I found a work from 1976 that I had never previously shown. It concerned the conventionality of those categories and was entitled Neither East nor West, Neither North nor South.

December 2013

¹ Luiza Nader, Language, Reality, Irony. The Art Books of Jarosław Kozłowski, in Art After Conceptual Art, ed. Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England, 2006. Polish version: Język, rzeczywistość, ironia, książki artystyczne Jarosława Kozłowskiego, in Artium Quaestiones XVI, Poznań 2005.

*Bożena Czubak, art historian and critic, curator of exhibition projects, author of numerous publications on contemporary visual culture, member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), and president of the Profile Foundation in Warsaw.