Anorexia

Krzysztof Cichoń: Who are you? A critic, an art historian, an artist?

Rafał Jakubowicz: I find it difficult to answer that question because, in my case, these fields of activity overlap. I work with art—that would probably be the truest answer. One can point to many artists who practised criticism, curated exhibitions and taught, such as John Coplans.

K. C.: Do you make a living from art, or from ‘working with art’?

R. J.: I teach at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań.

K. C.: Did you have any youthful doubts about what to become?

R. J.: No, I didn’t. But now, if I could turn back time and decide again, I would have many doubts and probably would not choose art a second time [laughs]. As a child, I liked drawing and was good at it. After finishing secondary school—a school of economics, incidentally—I knew that I wanted to apply to the Academy of Fine Arts. I studied art education and painting in parallel. For me, however, my studies in the education department were far more important. They provided better theoretical preparation, which, from today’s perspective, proved more important. It was there that I met Jaromir Jedliński and became friends with the late Włodek Filipek. I met Jerzy Ludwiński. My contact with Jedliński prompted me to begin writing about art. Before that, I had never even thought that I might do so.

K. C.: At some point you realised that writing or talking about art could be more interesting than what you had initially wanted to do—the manual facility inseparable from painting. Do you believe that instinctive artists still exist today, beasts of painting who shun theory…?

R. J.: I don’t think there is just one model. There is room for many different attitudes. The model of an artist who spends all day in the studio, isolated from the outside world and focused solely on their own work, is alien to me. That does not mean, of course, that such attitudes have no right to exist. Instinct is very important. So is intuition. I don’t think erudition alone is enough. Theoretical preparation is certainly insufficient. Something else is needed. Sensitivity, without doubt.

K. C.: Once, in a conversation with Jaromir Jedliński, Rafał Jakubowicz said: ‘When I asked Mirosław Bałka about his attitude towards Tadeusz Kantor’s works, Bałka said: “He treated art seriously, and so do I. That is probably the most important thing.”’ Would Rafał Jakubowicz endorse that statement?

R. J.: I hope so.

K. C.: And what is your attitude towards approaches connected with fooling around, with treating art as something entirely unserious, incidental and spontaneous? Treating art as an area in which the arbitrary rather than the necessary is revealed?

R. J.: One does not preclude the other. There is no either/or division. It is possible to create, in an entirely serious way, art that also contains an element of humour. I cannot stand bombast or pomposity in art. It seems to me that many of my works have had a rather subversive character.

K. C.: Which ones?

R. J.: For example, the exhibitions Form and Mittel Weiß at Foksal Gallery, Art Kills at Pies Gallery, one hundred and eighty something at Okna Gallery and the exhibition Cabinet at Entropia Gallery—portraits of culture ministers from 1989 to the present. And also Wassermann’s Gas Pipeline—a long yellow gas pipe displayed at Królikarnia like a work of Minimal art.

K. C.: Now that you mention it, I can see that. When one reads about your work, however, and studies biographies and other materials published in various places, one may form the impressiom[n] that you are an artist focused chiefly on remembering the Holocaust, immersed in an extremely serious and thoroughly intellectual practice of remembrance. All you need do is project a Hebrew inscription onto a swimming pool and descriptions include sentences such as: ‘The ominously protruding plumbing installation evokes associations with the tragedy of the concentration camps.’ How can one get from such territory to subversion or a joke?

R. J.: I treat my works as separate statements. It makes no sense to bring them together in a single exhibition. In fact, I have never shown them as part of one exhibition. They appear in different contexts and refer to different aspects of reality.

K. C.: One day you will face a retrospective—and what then?

R. J.: One must enter into dialogue with a retrospective and accept the challenge. One should not submit to convention by simply and unreflectively showing most of one’s work to date. An artist should always be critical of the context of an exhibition in which they participate. Only such an approach seems interesting and creative to me. Unless, of course, the artist is dead. Then the curator can do whatever they want. A living artist should protest, so I hope I won’t surrender that easily [laughs].

K.C.: Don’t you think that the duty to ‘be critical’ is a duty arising, to put it somewhat loftily, from the human condition? Not a special duty of artists, although somehow it has ‘come to pass’ that, in the public mind, it is precisely the artist—even an entertainer—who is expected to be critical, to elude established conventions. This is a question about what distinguishes being an artist. What is the convention of being an artist?

R. J.: Being critical is important, it seems to me, in every situation. The point is not to say that things should not be this way, but rather to show that what we habitually accept as obvious is not at all so. One should problematise reality by revealing the habitual ways of thinking we accept uncritically. ‘To practise criticism is—as Hal Foster puts it—to make easy gestures difficult.’ Criticism is the obligation to think about reality and about one’s own entanglement in it. This does not concern artists alone. But it should concern them above all.

K. C.: This leads to the conclusion that, in principle, the only sufficient quality or skill required for ‘being an artist’ is the ability to think. For many people, that is sufficient technical proficiency today. Are no other skills needed? Is it enough to think?

R. J.: I don’t want to generalise. As far as I am concerned, I usually try to select the most appropriate means for expressing the message I want to convey. Sometimes I make a video, sometimes an installation, and occasionally I paint pictures. The only thing I avoid is performance art, because I am not suited to it [laughs]. I am afraid of direct interaction with viewers because I have no idea how to conduct myself in such a situation. It seems artificial and pretentious to me at the same time. Whenever I watch a performance, I wait for the moment when the performer says ‘thank you’, thereby returning to reality [laughs]. My aversion to performance art may stem from the fact that I cannot stand theatre. Apart from Kantor’s theatre, of course [laughs]. There are works where very little really needs to be ‘done’ in a physical sense. One can also commission a professional service and merely oversee the production process. I don’t have to study sculpture for five years to make a cement cast, just as I don’t need my own darkroom to have photographs developed. When it comes to painting, however, the picture simply has to stand up on its own. Unless we are playing a game and certain decisions are deliberate. There are many ways of understanding painting. It is difficult to determine unequivocally what is and is not painting. Every attempt to define it is doomed to failure. Yet it is probably impossible to practise painting today unconsciously and unreflectively. One cannot paint in earnest as people did in the 1960s, because the reality around us has changed. We are somewhere else. Technical proficiency does not seem important to me. I have always associated it more with craft than with art.

K. C.: Artistic development or a career usually includes certain turning points. What, in your view, was such a moment in your case?

R. J.: The scandal surrounding Arbeitsdisziplin. Whenever censorship enters the picture, the result is heightened media interest.

K. C.: At what point did you realise that this was going to happen? When you were filming that security guard at the Volkswagen factory?

R. J.: The exhibition at the Arsenał in Poznań was to be my third—or rather my second—solo exhibition, not counting my degree show. At the time, I knew nothing about the mechanism of censorship and the scandal associated with it. I could not have predicted that the work would receive any response at all. Well, events unfolded as they did. And everything happened quietly, over the telephone, bypassing democratic procedures. The reactions of the VW management and the Mayor of Poznań, and consequently the act of censorship by the director of the Arsenał Gallery, may indicate that the work hit the mark. Going through those stages was very difficult for me at the time. I felt lost. It is important not to be alone in such a situation. Fortunately, I received the support of Jaromir Jedliński, Piotr Piotrowski and Jarosław Kozłowski, who jointly wrote a letter to ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ opposing prior censorship. Ewa Mikina wrote an article for ‘Magazyn Sztuki’. From today’s perspective, I think that the controversy surrounding Arbeitsdisziplin, which exposed various hidden mechanisms, dependencies and connections in the relationship between business, power and culture, was an interesting experience. At the same time, it was a kind of inoculation on the threshold of artistic independence…

K. C.: I wonder at what moments a person encounters censorship or situational pressure that forces them to abandon their intentions. Perhaps some difference between an artist and a non-artist, between art and non-art, appears here? When you teach students, there are countless minor situations in which not everything is said. Unless you always say everything and have never felt that kind of constraining pressure. Usually, it is not our superiors who oversee us, but our listeners. One tries to adapt mentally to one’s listeners, one’s audience. Don’t you do that? In the order of everyday life, as someone who lectures on Wednesdays from 2 to 10 p.m.?

R. J.: In a sense, I probably do… Although I don’t experience it as any particular discomfort. One probably has much more distance from classes with students than from one’s artistic work.

K. C.: I’m not at all sure about that, but such minor self-corrections and acts of self-censorship are probably unavoidable. Perhaps that is the difference? Within the sphere of an exhibition or a work, all external pressures and interventions grow into matters of fundamental, extraordinary severity.

R. J.: Discursive language makes it possible to formulate thoughts quite precisely. In art, reception occurs on different wavelengths. The message is less determinate, and meanings consequently overlap. A work of art can nevertheless express what cannot be contained in discursive language. Art may awaken dormant fears pushed into the unconscious. Might this be the source of such fierce reactions? But one must also remember that art is an easy target for politicians because artists are weak and can therefore be attacked with impunity, allowing politicians to gain political capital. By presenting themselves in the media as defenders of morality on a crusade against the corruption of contemporary art, politicians win voters’ favour and applause. They know this perfectly well and exploit it cynically, employing demagoguery.

K. C.: When one makes an exhibition—at least this is how I imagine it—it never occurs to one to speak the same language as the audience? Is that the very last consideration? Perhaps that is what infantilises the educational process?

R. J.: When making an exhibition, one also thinks about formulating a message in such a way that it can reach its audience. Yet in the language of the visual arts the message is not unambiguous; many layers emerge and works can be read on many levels. The public may follow various interpretative paths. The more possible ways of reading a work, the better. A work of art should be multilayered.

K. C.: Like a good lecture or a text about that work of art. Tadeusz Kantor, Mirosław Bałka, Luc Tuymans—who else is important to you in art? Have you been delighted by anyone recently?

R. J.: Kantor was my first great fascination. In fact, he was my entry into the world of art, a kind of initiation. Later I became fascinated by Bałka’s art. And finally by Tuymans’s. Have I been delighted by anyone recently? I don’t think so. But I have seen several works that made a great impression on me. I greatly value Artur Żmijewski’s works, which pose certain problems anew, redefine and problematise them, and present them from a different, unexpected and surprising perspective. Recently, I have been more interested in documentary film than in art. Marcel and Paweł Łoziński, Dariusz Jabłoński, Maciej Drygas, Andrzej Brzozowski, Krzysztof Kieślowski and others. I discovered the magic of documentary thanks to Włodek Filipek, who was also a documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and journalist. Meetings and conversations with Włodek constantly inspired me.

K. C.: Has any work by a student at the Poznań Academy of Fine Arts made a great impression on you recently?

R. J.: No.

K. C.: One can trace certain similarities, or traces of migrating motifs, between your theoretical interests and your works.

R. J.: There really is something of that kind. And I suppose it simply has to be that way. We do not move in a vacuum. We function within a particular context in which we are embedded. We always relate to something that came before, even if we contest it. We are situated within various conditions that constrain us and determine the boundaries of our world. What we work on, what we read and watch, and what we experience influence what we do and the artistic choices we make. All of this accumulates and forms layers somewhere. I nevertheless always try to ensure that my art remains distant from the approaches of the artists I value. But they probably influence it all the same. It seeps through by osmosis. It is worth being aware of what came before, if only to avoid unpleasant disappointment when it turns out that we have discovered lands conquered long ago. While painting the series zugzwang, I was interested in Tuymans’s painting. Then I realised that what I was doing was too close to what Tuymans did, and that bothered me greatly…

K. C.: Why?

R. J.: My interest in Tuymans was reflected in how I painted. I simply felt uncomfortable with it. So I moved away from it quickly.

K. C.: Isn’t this a good starting point for considering the difference between historical and contemporary art? In the past, you would have been an artist from Tuymans’s circle. Perhaps because the mental distances between people were different and social density was different. At the time, it did not matter that someone had a similar manner of painting. More than that, it could provide a basis for calmly developing subtle differences, a kind of technical dialogue or dispute. Why can an artist today not allow themselves to be mistaken for another artist?

R. J.: Painting that series was an important experience for me. I felt at the time that I had worked through it, that the formula had been exhausted. And there was no point repeating it. I try to make every exhibition different, a new chapter, something that surprises me as well. Work on each new project should be an intriguing, energising process—an attempt to construct a new statement. A work is not a product. It should be alive. If I were to continue, for example, painting in a certain manner that I had already mastered and in which, moreover, I felt safe, one would have to ask: why bother? It would simply be boring.

K. C.: Isn’t that a legacy of the avant-garde attitude and its compulsion for novelty? Art must constantly be new and fresh.

R. J.: I don’t think so. In the case of the avant-gardes, artists moved together; they had shared aims and particular ideals. In essence, they created similar works. The same was true of New Expression in the 1980s, which opposed Conceptual art. Everyone painted wild pictures then, essentially in a similar style. The distances between artists have now increased. I am not so much searching for novelty as trying to escape pigeonholing and predictability. When creating a work of art, I would like to surprise its audience. And I would also like to feel surprised by what I have made.

K. C.: Did you spend a long time thinking about the exhibition at Atlas Sztuki?

R. J.: No, I didn’t think about it for long. A positive experience had been my earlier work on the text for the catalogue of Elżbieta Janicka’s exhibition, Odd Place, which made a great impression on me. Atlas Sztuki is a private but non-commercial gallery. I don’t know whether there is another gallery in Poland with a similar status. The art market and a network of thriving private galleries—all of this is important, but state patronage, which does not exist in Poland or is too weak, should exist as well.

K. C.: Does it necessarily have to be state patronage? Perhaps simply patronage.

R. J.: A deliberate cultural policy implemented by institutions established for that purpose and concerned with contemporary art. I do not entirely believe in the good intentions of private patrons. Poland lacks public galleries and institutions capable of realising artists’ projects professionally. From that perspective, working with Atlas Sztuki is comfortable. The exhibition is treated seriously and the catalogue prepared conscientiously. But we are only at the beginning, still preparing the exhibition. We shall see, because we do not yet know how it will turn out [laughs]. There are, of course, also independent venues that sometimes realise more interesting projects than institutional galleries, with virtually no budget—Pies Gallery in Poznań, for example. Pies is one of the few galleries where I enjoy attending openings [laughs]. It has a good energy. It is difficult to determine unequivocally whether it is an independent or commercial gallery. It is a young gallery and its future direction is not yet known. Divisions can be blurred; galleries today can function on several levels and assume different roles depending on the situation. What matters most is the commitment of the person running the gallery, which can simply be felt. Yet neither the activity of commercial nor independent galleries relieves public institutions of responsibility for culture.

K. C.: You lament the absence of a deliberate cultural policy. Perhaps nothing of the kind can exist any longer, given the diversity of life paths and our need to distinguish ourselves from others. Policy presupposes some form of collective identification, and that is in poor shape today, especially in contemporary art, where—as we have just established—there are nothing but unique individuals. What could provide a common ground—morality, nationality, ethnicity? That might make sense from the perspective of the Foreign Ministry. Perhaps we have such great opportunities for individual development that, to put it more geometrio, the distances between people have already exceeded the limits that make a coherent public sphere possible? If we do not want to be mistaken for someone else, we must accept all the consequences.

R. J.: I suppose this arises from my left-wing convictions. I don’t think everything can be handled by the art market. The market is necessary, indeed indispensable, but not as the sole point of reference. Jaromir Jedliński once observed that conformism towards the rules of the market is no better than conformism towards the prevailing ideology. The state has a duty to care for culture, although this is not about ‘morality’, ‘nationality’ or ‘ethnicity’—something associated more with ‘national heritage’ than ‘culture’. Education through art is important, as is the attempt to address socially significant problems within contemporary art so that they can subsequently be discussed more widely. Meanwhile, politicians and right-wing commentators habitually describe contemporary art in terms of deviance, excess or provocation, or as a metaphor for illness or degeneration, invariably dragging the discussion down to the same level—the ground floor. An extreme illustration of the problem is, for example, the gibberish of Cezary Michalski and Łukasz Radwan. In this kind of ‘discussion’, one can never move beyond the most elementary level: the question ‘is this art?’ [laughs].

K. C.: What do you mean by left-wing? I would like a qualifying adjective.

R. J.: Yes, it really is a catch-all term into which anything can be thrown…

K. C.: Do you believe in progress? Progress in art, for example?

R. J.: As Émile Durkheim once said, an intellectual has a duty to be on the left. I do not mean progress, progress in art or art in general. In my case, it is more a negative identification, reinforced in a way by the situation: by the omnipresent filth of the Fourth Polish Republic, which provokes greater clarity of attitude and a more radical declaration of one’s position. What until recently seemed impossible—Giertych and Lepper as deputy prime ministers, for example—is becoming the norm today. We have already become accustomed to it. Each successive news report provokes neither surprise nor an impulse to protest. We have been anaesthetised; the threshold of social sensitivity has fallen. The extreme populist right is quietly appropriating one area after another, behaving ever more arrogantly as it does so. The governing coalition wants to change the constitution and take possession of everything. The situation is becoming increasingly dangerous. It is simply a slippery slope. The language of power is drawing closer to that of Radio Maryja. It is worth recalling the recent turmoil over vetting, with public spectacles, people being drenched in buckets of slop and a peculiar witch-hunt, while the authorities’ principal aim was to set university and academic circles against one another, weaken and divide them so that they would be easier to control later. They wanted to humiliate these circles by forcing them to sign a peculiar kind of loyalty declaration. Not even the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic went that far. An attempt was made to create an exceptional law that conflicted with existing law, including the presumption of innocence. Pure absurdity. The state simply could not care less about the individual, the citizen. All it does is stage vetting circuses or ABW and CBA show trials to create the impression that there are those who are ‘guilty’—that is, ‘other’. The authorities are evidently inclining towards a conspiracy theory of history. Everything appears to be moving towards a soft dictatorship. ‘Soft’ because, fortunately, we are in the European Union, which pumps money into the country without which the authorities could not spread their propaganda of success. The worst sphere is mentality. A catastrophe. Concrete. A musty, provincial construct of the collective identity of the Pole as Catholic is being created, standing in glaring opposition to European values and promoting the mentality of a philistine Sarmatian. An image of a common enemy is constantly being constructed, fuelling imaginary threats. We are heading towards becoming Europe’s open-air museum, even a European Taliban, towards the model of a closed and extremely intolerant society. And then there is the language, the Kaczyński brothers’ newspeak: ‘układ’, ‘łże-elity’, ‘wykształciuchy’, ‘grupomyśl’, because, of course, those who do not share their views do not think independently [laughs]. We could do with someone like Victor Klemperer to describe ‘Ligua Quatri Reaspublicae’. Recently, attempts have been made to remove Gombrowicz and Kafka, among others, from school reading lists. What next? What will the next step be? Creating an index of prohibited books? A campaign of publicly burning their works? Let us hope that a positive effect of all this will be a kind of awakening among the thinking part of society, an explosion of left-wing attitudes. The circle around ‘Krytyka Polityczna’, which brings artists together, seems an interesting proposition. The present situation undoubtedly demands much greater engagement, clarity and resolve. Steadfastness and the courage to object. It is important not to succumb to the hateful rhetoric of the Holy Inquisitors of the Fourth Polish Republic, and to defend ourselves against their venom in every possible way. Not to let ourselves be stupefied or succumb to the omnipresent propaganda. What is happening in this country is seen from outside as ridiculous. It is associated with social backwardness. I remember that when I participated in an exhibition in Prague, the Czech artists laughed uproariously at our situation. It was shameful. Unfortunately, from the inside it looks entirely different. It ceases to be funny.

K. C.: ‘Wykształciuchy’, ‘łże-elity’, ‘grupomyśl’ are very tasty new linguistic forms, practically ready to be exhibited…

R. J.: On the one hand amusing, or ‘tasty’, as you put it; on the other, unfortunately, frightening… As we know from history, certain processes begin precisely at the level of language. Later they are difficult to stop. These symptoms cannot be ignored.

K. C.: Since we are talking about populism—what do you think of the Baroque? Expressiveness and popular appeal are presumably features shared by both. I am asking about the Baroque as a style of life and creation. Its opposite is probably what is called ‘the anorexia of contemporary art’. Anorexia in art, like any other kind, consists in the constant pursuit of minimising form, in refraining from an expressive gesture, invoking suggestion and silence in the face of a present so sensualist and bombastic. I would cast you as the anorexic. Isn’t this a direct road to disappearance? To the still greater marginalisation of art [tears]?

R. J.: An anorexic? [laughs] Well, I have to watch my weight, so I am constantly dieting, although it doesn’t always work [laughs]. Returning to the subject, I think that sometimes less can mean more. It is a peculiar paradox…

K. C.: That is not a paradox; it is the anorexic’s way of thinking. Although perhaps it is sometimes true…

R. J.: I always try to use the minimum means to express what I want to convey. So if something can be expressed using, say, five kilograms, we need not use fifty-five. In art, paradoxically, five may carry more weight than fifty-five. The message should be subtle. But there are also other aspects of this peculiar anorexia. I realised most of my works from my own modest budget, without any support. I therefore had to think constantly about keeping production costs down, minimising expenditure without sacrificing quality or making artistic compromises, which is difficult. I still do not have a studio, so I tend to make fairly small works [laughs]. When Atlas Sztuki suggested that there were no constraints on the production budget and that a costly project was in fact expected, I was almost terrified [laughs], because I had never thought in such terms before. Thus, paradoxically, that expectation became a peculiar difficulty. In the end, I proposed a visually very modest project [laughs]. In general, I don’t work much. I’m lazy [laughs]. Work, work, work… What for? I usually realise projects for specific exhibitions, generally at the last moment [laughs]. I suspect that even if I had a studio, I would not spend twelve hours a day there. I probably would not have the patience. Well, perhaps one day, in the future…

K. C.: Less is more. That is a firmly articulated compositional conviction. Is it not the case that, because of such convictions, certain areas we agree are important—art, for example—in which things fundamental to human beings manifest themselves, surrender their place of their own accord to spheres such as politics or the penal code, where more means more and less means less? Isn’t that conceding ground for nothing?

R.J.: Most artists are probably on the left. I cannot imagine it being otherwise. The response to the present political situation may be a polarisation and radicalisation of views and, as a result, a genuine return of art to a kind of ‘Polish Baroque’, as Anda Rottenberg once called it, something we could observe in the 1980s. At that time, however, the Church gave artists shelter because that alliance served its interests in the struggle against the communist system. Today things are different. The Church is hostile to contemporary art. Yet even then, the most interesting phenomena took place outside the Church, in independent venues. The New Wild Ones eluded both the regime’s authorities and the Church circuit. They showed that it was possible to contest the regime and the Church simultaneously. Art often changed at moments when one had to define one’s position. That is dangerous because art can become a tool and may thereby become more heavy-handed. But art is capable of surviving difficult historical moments.

K. C.: It may become a ‘weapon in the struggle’.

R. J.: Yes. But on the other hand, I think that such a return is, fortunately, almost impossible now. Or at least highly unlikely. Didactic art is always weak. Will artists now go underground? They are more likely simply to leave, and a barren land will remain. A desert. And all of Poland will read to its children—only it will read Dobraczyński and Dmowski [laughs].

K. C.: Dmowski and Dobraczyński seem entirely at home as protagonists of ‘The Waste Land’. The exhibition at Atlas Sztuki consists of elements that blur the differences between gallery space and the space of sporting venues. Have you ever practised any sport?

R. J.: Never. I neither understand nor tolerate sport. It bores me terribly. I have never been to a match of any kind. When I try to watch sports programmes on television, my attention switches off and I begin thinking about something completely different, or I simply fall asleep. I came up with the idea for one of the works in the Atlas Sztuki exhibition while watching a basketball match, precisely because I ‘switched off’ [laughs]. I always managed to avoid physical-education classes. I only played table football [laughs]. The exhibition designed for Atlas Sztuki grows out of the experience of Form and Mittel Weiß. It continues that path. Those exhibitions entered into dialogue with the historical context of a particular place—Foksal Gallery—which invested them with meaning. Outside Foksal Gallery, both exhibitions would have been almost illegible gestures. What will ti tabu dibu daj be? Perhaps my path towards understanding sport [laughs]. The exhibition will concern a certain incompatibility, a dissonance. The title was taken from a very vulgar disco-polo song. Wicker will appear. Perhaps soon, when the artists have left, Polish culture will be associated solely with wickerwork. There is therefore nothing for it but to draw on that tradition now [laughs].