The Gallery Is Never Empty

Sebastian Cichocki: You occupy a highly distinctive place on the map of artistic practices and strategies in Poland. You consistently carry your ideological commitment to defending animal rights into the field of art, move fluidly into activism, and transfer authorship of your works to beings of other species… This stance has consequences: you operate somewhat on the margins of museums and galleries. That makes me all the more interested in your forthcoming institutional presentation in Łódź. I would like us to begin our conversation by outlining the conception of Contract Killer, the exhibition you are preparing at Atlas Sztuki. What is its scenario?

Leszek Golec: Our point of departure is the fact that, on the list of global killers, eating meat ranks ahead of alcohol and cigarettes. We draw on research findings concerning this issue.

S.C.: Is the document itself, the starkly presented information, part of the exhibition?

L.G.: Yes. The text explains what the titular ‘contract killer’ is. We pay for meat and it kills us. A simple equation. The words will be displayed on the wall in the foyer. In one of the rooms, we are building a wall all the way up to the ceiling. It is narrow and rather dark in there. You can see a glass surface through which it is possible to look inside. This is where Melania walks around.

S.C.: Melania the sheep…

L.G.: Melania the sheep. A vegan, like every sheep. Visitors will be able to read information about Melania here. She is employed at the zoo.

Tatiana Czekalska: Melania also does occasional jobs: once a year, she takes part in a Nativity scene in front of the largest building in Łódź, the Archcathedral of St Stanislaus Kostka.

L.G.: It is quite a spectacle. There are always articles and photographs in the press. The Nativity scene excites the faithful. They write about Melania, how old she is and what she likes. People recognise her.

T.C.: Melania is famous. She is a celebrity.

L.G.: And this is where the problem lies. We can see it. Midnight Mass follows Christmas Eve. Meat is not eaten during Christmas Eve dinner. At midnight, everything changes. Yet people look at the Nativity scene during Midnight Mass. They show the animals to children: oh, look, that is Melania, touch her nose. Fifteen minutes later, the children encounter Melania’s friends served on a plate. The same child has such radically different experiences of animals within a very short time. We find it difficult to accept. It defies logic. Nothing here is as it should be. Each time, people are delighted anew by the presence of a living animal, yet this does not trouble them in the least when they sit down at the table. So Melania finishes her two-week service in the Nativity scene on 7 January and begins at the gallery on 13 January. We want her to be remembered from her previous role.

S.C.: An animal enters the gallery space…

T.C.: Only for a few hours. It turns out that the gallery cannot be cooled sufficiently for a sheep to feel comfortable there.

L.G.: It was an interesting experience for us. It seemed that everything had been planned: a good keeper, excellent transport, treats and a wonderful space. It turns out that the difference in temperature means the sheep would have to adapt to the new conditions at the zoo, for example in the giraffe enclosure. There proved to be no room with the giraffe. We therefore had to shorten the sheep’s stay at the gallery to four hours. We have permission only for that length of time. Meanwhile, Jacek Michalak, the president of Atlas Sztuki, who loves difficult tasks, decided to take on the challenges posed by the project. He called in specialists to adapt the temperature to the animal’s needs and provide the required four degrees in the room. It turns out, however, that the heating system covers the entire gallery and the temperature cannot be lowered in just one selected room. Who knows what will happen, though. If we have a warm winter and January temperatures remain above zero, Melania will be able to spend longer in the gallery. Security guards will watch over the sheep during the opening—the kind employed by the gallery for exhibition openings. I would like to photograph Melania with two bodyguards. After the opening, only the photograph will be displayed. There may also be a film made for us by our friend Piotr Wysocki.

S.C.: Is the gallery space specially arranged to meet the animal’s needs, or are you leaving it unchanged—a sterile, cleared exhibition room?

T.C.: It will remain almost unchanged. At the back, we are arranging only a small resting place for Melania, something like a pen, with her favourite things, which will not be visible to the public. This sheep was bottle-fed and seeks contact with people.

L.G.: We want the wall and floors to be painted red. The lighting will be quite theatrical. Details matter to us.

L.G.: The second room will contain large-format photographs. They form a series for which our friend, a performance artist who has been vegetarian for four years, poses. In some of them, the cat looks like the Lamb of God. If you did not know it was a cat, you might think it was an abstract, blurred patch. The cat wanders the earth, exploring it. It is a mysterious living being that has set out on a journey. Sometimes it tries to force its way into places, such as a church. The images look like illustrations for a fairy tale, outside time, with something of the Brothers Grimm in their atmosphere.

S.C.: The cat appears here like a ball of ectoplasm. Where were these photographs taken?

L.G.: In many different places. We will not reveal them in the exhibition. Here, for example, you can see one of the churches in Łódź. At high magnification, details of the ceramic floor become visible; there are crosses on it. Details of the sacred space reveal themselves. The cat enters where, in principle, no one wants it. It pushes its head inside. Sometimes it appears in an industrial space. You would certainly like this place…

T.C.: In this photograph, you can see a pigeon that had spent the night in an abandoned post-industrial space. A wanderer. It was so tired that it had absolutely no interest in our presence or the entire photo shoot. It helped us greatly by posing.

L.G.: It was in a town called Wierzbica near Radom. A cement works was built there during Edward Gierek’s time, one of the largest in Europe. It was sold to a French investor who did not even intend to invest in it. He wanted to eliminate the competition. The cement works was abandoned and is now a complete ruin. It is an extraordinary space, with the kind of atmosphere you often seek: vast industrial spaces overgrown with plants, with enormous halls and chimneys. There are also night photographs by the sea. Here, the animal seems something very primordial, some primeval reptile emerging from the foam. The cat also wanders through cemeteries.

S.C.: Does the cat accompany you on your travels?

L.G.: Yes. Everything is real, not digitally created. Sometimes we remove certain elements on the computer, such as candles burning in a cemetery. The cat poses for us professionally and is never bored. Naturally, we have certain expectations; we want it to do something for us. But it does things in its own way regardless, and that is better than our plan. It is very creative and surprises us with its ideas.

S.C.: Here we touch upon a very important strand in your art: interspecies collaboration. In Homo Anobium Saint Francis 100% Sculpture 1680–1985, a seventeenth-century wooden sculpture of St Francis had been eaten into by woodworm, which had bored tunnels inside the figure. You recognised the insects as the artist’s collaborators, modifying the work over the centuries. In another work, T.atrica Metamorphosisimperfecta, you limited your role to that of curators who foreground the presence of another species—in this case a spider—giving a performance by shedding its exoskeleton. This sloughed-off part of the spider’s outer layer becomes a trace of the performance, much like props of uncertain status used by human artists. What is your relationship with non-human artists? Various kinds of interspecies cooperation appear in the field of art, but animals are generally treated instrumentally, as moving objects…

T.C.: In our works, animals are co-authors or even autonomous authors. We believe their presence is a way of gaining new territory in art. In the case of Homo Anobium…, we found the work made by animals even more interesting than the sculpture itself. This is art. Our role was entirely curatorial; the artist was the deathwatch beetle.

L.G.: We withdrew. It was similar at Ujazdowski Castle, where we assisted a spider as it moulted. We gave the animals a free hand. We merely put up museum barriers.

S.C.: I understand that you wanted to focus the viewer’s attention on what is almost invisible, overlooked by visitors to art institutions.

L.G.: Yes. It arose from our reflection that there is no place without life. This was a fundamental discovery. There is no empty gallery. There is no empty museum. Think of bacteria, mites, spiders…

T.C.: They are constantly creating. They are doing their work. It is a form of creativity that is diligently removed.

S.C.: You treat every form of life with immense respect. I recall the luxurious, futuristic design of the Avatars, devices intended to save the lives of other beings. Made from precious materials, these instruments were designed to carry insects out of the museum without harming them. To me, this sounds like a perversely convoluted form of institutional critique.

L.G.: The Avatars were the next step. We think about things to which, I suspect, few people pay any attention at all. For example, spiders living in a gallery are not removed before it is painted. These beings were on Earth before humans appeared. We are the intruders. The Avatars were deliberately made of gold; they were intended as snobbish objects. Gold has antiseptic and bacteriostatic properties; bacteria and viruses do not develop in its presence.

S.C.: They remind me of surgical instruments…

L.G.: Yes, the instruments used by surgeons and dentists are gold-plated. But the chalice used by priests in church is also gold. Different priests drink from it, and germs should not be transmitted. Even the gold-plated teaspoons used in the Soviet Union during the communist era, despite the poverty, were made for reasons of hygiene. Gold teeth and crowns were not merely intended to attract attention. Gold is used everywhere for the same hygienic reasons. That is why our tools for helping were also gold, not only because we wanted them to be elegant.

S.C.: At the same time as you were producing these exclusive objects for helping insects, openings and fissures appeared in gallery walls, shaped in a highly elegant fashion. I remember the curators of Art in General in New York describing how laborious, arduous and precise the process of making these hollows was, allowing insects to leave the gallery. I find this strand in your art fascinating: reflection on the fact that there are no empty rooms. It points me towards the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, when artists often reduced the gallery space, or towards curatorial practices such as those implemented by Seth Siegelaub. A work of art can be limited to the transfer of a certain energy; it may be invisible. Ludwiński wrote about this persuasively, anticipating the emergence of a new art form that would dispense with gallery infrastructure and instead be transmitted directly from artist to audience through something resembling telepathy. To me, your art is also a kind of announcement of what may happen in the future. It is a promise, a return to the ultimate dematerialisation of the work of art with which artists flirted several decades ago. In your practice, this process is not sterile; something that might be described as ‘organic residue’ appears. It penetrates the pores of the gallery, where life is born…

L.G.: There are no entirely sterile places. Not even a hospital is sterile. I take a bite from an apple and—as if from nowhere— Drosophila melanogaster appears: my favourite performer, the fruit fly, a living being condemned by us to endless suffering as a ‘convenient object for genetic testing’. I dedicated the work IMPLANT I to it at Galeria Wschodnia in 1995—a device discreetly concealed in the wall stirred grape-based communion wine, an exceptional delicacy for fruit flies.

S.C.: You often call yourselves curators. You accompany a certain mystery, a transfiguration, mediating between non-human actors and the public. This is a distinctive and rare curatorial stance: complete trust, following the artist and their actions without unnecessary interference.

L.G.: Perhaps I do not entirely like the word curator. I would rather use the term ‘navigator’. It is navigation, even at a distance.

S.C.: I think it concerns navigating the audience to a greater extent than navigating your collaborators, other species… I would like to ask you about something else; let us reverse the situation. I am interested in occasions when you make the gallery space available to members of other species who this time assume the role of viewers. I recall your 1996 exhibition From Two Energies, Strangely a Third, when you tried to create a space that would be of interest not only to people but also to cats. How can a museum or gallery be used by other species? Our vision of contact with art is, of course, profoundly humanist. Art is for people. Can you imagine museums of the future also oriented towards other species?

L.G.: I think such a space can safely be made alluring to other species as well. In the exhibition From Two Energies, Strangely a Third we used sprayed valerian, which cats adore.

T.C.: We carved a fissure in the wall in the shape of a cat’s nose. It was positioned at a height suitable for cats. Valerian was sprayed from the opening at intervals by an aquarium pump installed in the wall. The scent was strong enough for people to smell it too. We installed an air-filtering and strongly ionising device in the concrete floor; negative ions have a beneficial effect on the human body.

L.G.: The room was completely cleared of all other elements, so the opening also attracted people’s attention. It was attractive and well formed, and also enticed them with a pleasant sound, like a miniature waterfall.

T.C.: The idea did not arise immediately. We discovered that a family of cats lived near the gallery, in the Laboratory space behind Ujazdowski Castle. We decided to invite them to the exhibition. The building, which has since been renovated, was in poor condition then. Various old sculptures, discarded objects and forgotten elements of artists’ installations lay there. I felt that cats must be living there.

L.G.: We held a photo shoot when the entire cat family entered the space. We are interested in occasions when animals inhabit gallery spaces, for example staff offices. This rarely happens. Animals are Zen, very simple. When hungry, they eat; when tired, they sleep; they love selflessly and do not ‘add’ anything to love as people do. There is something special about the presence of animals; I sensed it… Recently, I have come to know that they change us through their presence, and that their very presence helps maintain the balance necessary for preserving life on Earth.

T.C.: Churches are the worst. Animals have been driven out of them.

L.G.: Franciscans raise animals. Beside the monastery you can now see a slaughterhouse…

S.C.: We are fantasising about an interspecies dialogue that could occur in the field of art. We can imagine that in fifty or a hundred years, artistic creation incorporating another perspective and the presence of a non-human audience will be commonplace. Posthumanist reflection is becoming increasingly popular…

L.G.: I do not know whether any of this will be necessary. Were it not for the sadness caused by the absence of reflection on death and suffering, I would not do what I do. We eat strangers. You can imagine a situation in which you oppose someone who has harmed you. You defend yourself; you take revenge. Yet we are in a constant state of war—a war against strangers, a war we are losing. Someone is constantly dying because of us: farms, slaughterhouses, processing plants. This is why I make art. I am not interested in making decorations. What happens around me, however, wakes me from meditation. I know it is worth going outside. We take the cat and set off, so that we can talk, as we are talking with you now. Yet when I meditate, art is the last thing that seems necessary to me. If other, higher civilisations exist, there is no art there. There is no reason for it. In that other world, I can send you a beautiful image; we can communicate through thought. That is not a problem. A gallery is unnecessary; there are faster means of transfer…

S.C.: Which is not far removed from ideas about the development of art proposed by theorists, including Ludwiński, whom I mentioned: an art that dispenses with architecture, institutional rituals and even movement through space… So I will ask you this: what purpose do these projects serve? Are they a conveyor belt for communicating particular messages—meat kills, animals suffer, life is everywhere around us—or are they a kind of intellectual exercise? I ask because I see a certain rupture in your practice. This art has an engaged, activist quality, yet at the same time it is very delicate, subtle and often conceptual. There is no shout here; there is a whisper, and a discreet one. You refrain from radical actions even though you proclaim radical slogans. We move within a fairly closed circuit. Even when we proclaim important ideas, they most often reach a handful of people who no longer need convincing. Where is the effect?

L.G.: It has happened many times that our message reached people who wanted to open themselves to it. We distribute leaflets containing information about the harmful effects of eating meat. They disappear quickly; I believe people want to confront these facts.

T.C.: For me, art brings real change in its wake. Art is often first. An artist observes something and responds to it, sometimes ineptly. The process of change does indeed begin gently. Yet change is already inevitable. It remains in the minds of people who encounter art and alters their way of thinking, even though this may take a very long time. A kind of morphogenetic field is created and operates continuously. And there is activism too: I volunteer for an animal welfare organisation and an animal shelter; I have completed specialist training for inspectors and can intervene. There is room for a whisper and room for a shout…

L.G.: It is not that I do not want to shout when I see a vehicle carrying animals to slaughter. Yet gentle action is important to me. During an exhibition in Szczecin in which we recently took part—Paradise (as part of the inSpiracje International Visual Arts Festival, 2011—S.C.’s note)—curated by Kamil Kuskowski, we gave our fee to the curator, funding a full day of meals for him at a vegan restaurant. For me, this is an exceptionally successful performance. The curator was able to eat in such a place while creating paradise! Delicate, barely perceptible things genuinely delight me.

S.C.: This is another category of your activities, more direct ones: performances intended to improve someone’s quality of life directly, here and now. You pass on the money at your disposal for an art project. I would call them ‘bank-transfer performances’, in which you address the economic parameters governing art institutions and their qualitative effect on the surrounding social reality, on the quality of life of people and animals. The funds available to art institutions are spent not entirely against their intentions, yet highly peculiar paradoxes arise in connection with the financial circulation of galleries. In The Scam, realised in Słupsk, Ewa Rybska and Włodzimierz Kazimierczak were to pay the money you had received to carry out the project back into the gallery’s account. They themselves became actors, while you defined your role as that of scriptwriters and directors. On another occasion, money for a project in countries of the former Soviet Union went into an account intended to help victims of the war in Chechnya. Several years ago, I myself took part in your The Favourite Performance, transferring money to the account of an association for children with intellectual disabilities in Bytom. I wonder what all this means to you personally, as a couple who make art together. What does this ‘generosity’ of art consist in? Why do you need it? Why this peculiar activity whose effects are so difficult to see? Leszek appears to leave the field of art without regret, while you, Tatiana, speak of art as the vanguard of change—a change within us that entails long-term consequences…

L.G.: The art of giving brings me joy. Few things can awaken this kind of joy in a person, at the moment of giving and whenever you think about it afterwards.

T.C.: It builds up within us and has to find an outlet. Art offers an exceptional possibility of expression and is bounded by nothing. It is free. You can say anything. It is not the easiest path, nor the shortest.

S.C.: Your proposals nevertheless emerge from the field of art, which is risky. I am thinking of the petrifying, disarming label of the art project, which makes it harder to have a genuine impact on reality.

L.G.: That is why I do not sign many things. I try to ensure that our texts and documents circulate beyond the art world.

S.C.: You move quite freely between art and an educational, awareness-raising project. I nevertheless have the impression that, if the need arose, you would leave the field of art without much regret.

L.G.: I do not think we insist on occupying a particular territory in art, but we will certainly defend the territory of our consciousness.

S.C.: Are we dealing with the stance of a ‘non-believing practitioner’, someone who has lost faith in art’s efficacy? Someone who practises not because of profound faith, but because of pleasure, habit and other hidden, obscure motivations… I would not entirely share your doubts, however. I believe that discreet gestures of this kind may also affect reality, even if their effects are felt only in the distant future. That is why ambiguous gestures interest me. I therefore follow your photographic series attentively, for example, because ideology is not as clearly present in them as it is in bank transfers, writing petitions, ‘culinary’ events and so forth. Perhaps ideas for the future are also concealed there, such as art institutions open to other species, not only humans…

L.G.: I imagine queues of animals standing before a museum building, as though before an ark…

S.C.: Allowing such visions is a consequence of your art. I recently spoke with a property developer who is to erect a modern apartment building on the right bank of the Vistula, in Warsaw’s Praga district. It is quite progressive and technologically advanced architecture, intended for highly discerning, affluent residents. Interestingly, the developer described how the building would be designed with the needs of all its users in mind—including animals! Faster, independent access to the garden for dogs and cats, steps of an appropriate height, and so on. This is a gigantic change, a posthumanist reflection in thinking about urban design. I see it anticipated in works such as your From Two Energies, Strangely a Third.

T.C.: That is also why we try so forcefully to emphasise the animal’s presence in the gallery space—to such an extent that the presence becomes almost mystical…

L.G.: Do you remember our project Columbaria?

S.C.: Yes, luxurious homes for pigeons.

L.G.: The ancient Romans already built such animal homes in their cities. They incorporated these beautiful structures into their architecture, without improvisation or cobbling something together from planks. The openings faced south, towards the sun. They therefore thought of cities as places inhabited jointly by animals and humans. Istanbul, too, contains many such micro-homes for pigeons. You see an interesting, well-designed architectural element on a building’s façade and suddenly birds fly into it. They are fascinating castles for pigeons, with corridors and rooms inside. And these structures date from the seventeenth century!

T.C.: Likewise, when we design beautiful, luxurious objects for animals in gold or silver—our Avatars—we emphasise how important these other beings are to us. We draw the viewer’s attention to this. At first, it may seem bizarre, but suddenly everything falls into place. It begins to make profound sense.

S.C.: Thank you both for the conversation.

*28 October 2011, vegan restaurant Loving Hut, Warsaw