Only My Own Reflection Does Not Deceive Me

Christian Tomaszewski creates ambiguous, indeterminate places and situations, suspended between different realities and belonging fully to none. He constructs reflective realities in which one reality is mirrored in another, producing an illusion of reality that the artist — at times with considerable expenditure of resources — makes real. In Writing a Crime (2001), a pair of actors perform dialogue scenes from more than a dozen films of varying renown; a thirty-five-minute film edited from these dialogues is shown on two monitors installed in an old carriage. In The Theatre and Its Double (2004), a hired actor delivers statements by thirty-six artists published as commentaries on their own work in the popular compendium “Art Now”. All these more or less provocative pronouncements about art are displayed on small monitors mounted like light bulbs on a six-branched chandelier. In Made in USA (2003), an enormous mirror mounted on a mobile wall reflects works by young American artists assembled in the Exit Art exhibition. In 3 x 9 (2004), a feng shui specialist invited by the artist proposes minor alterations to the interiors of the Poznański Palace in Łódź in order to introduce positive energy into these nineteenth-century bourgeois spaces and neutralise their adverse effects on the human psyche. Her interventions are limited to rearranging certain objects and introducing new elements into the museum space, including origami birds, goldfish in glass bowls, fresh fruit and flowers, boiled eggs, crystals and images of dragons.

Different realities reflect one another. The Far Eastern philosophy of “wind and water” encounters the bourgeois palace of a European industrialist; the art world, its institutions and customs encounter art; cinematic fiction encounters the image of history. We live in a world of mixed and muddied reality, where different worlds overlap and we can be certain of none of them, yet wish to reject none. Do we truly believe in the beneficial effects of feng shui? Do we attach importance to artists’ eccentric statements about their work? Do we find our own world in cinematic fiction? Not entirely. Yet we feel that airing an old bourgeois interior with feng shui can do no harm and may even be amusing. We continue to ask artists to comment on their work in the belief that they will explain or clarify something, perhaps merely suggesting an interpretation or revealing a meaning. In cinematic fiction, we find something of ourselves and our unconscious desires, and psychoanalysis has taught us not to disregard this. One might say that we have lost our way in the amusement park of a reality of our own making, rendered powerless before a complexity whose perception exceeds our abilities. And what of art?

Michael Newman writes that modernism bequeathed us two contradictory answers to the question “What is art?” One says that art is art; the other, precisely the opposite, that art is non-art. Art either strives for autonomy or, conversely, continually transgresses art. Taught by the experience of Schwitters’s Merzbau and Duchamp’s readymades, postmodernism refrains from answering the question of what art is in either/or terms. Art that strives for autonomy remains dependent on its other and is therefore always already heteronomous; art that attempts to move beyond art, in turn, will sooner or later be absorbed by art, its institutions and its ontology, or else lose the radical possibilities inherent in artistic autonomy. Christian Tomaszewski’s practice grows out of this tradition. It appears autonomous when the artist draws on existing films, works or statements by other artists, yet simultaneously exceeds that autonomy by invoking the media reality that has become an integral part of everyday experience for Tomaszewski’s generation. Dmitri Prigov once asked: “How can one return to literature, remaining within it but emerging from it unscathed?” Tomaszewski might repeat the question: how can one return to art, remaining within it and simultaneously emerging unscathed?

In his most recent works, including the project prepared for Atlas Sztuki in Łódź, Tomaszewski uses David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, a familiar and extensively discussed film regarded as a paradigmatic example of postmodern cinema. Tomaszewski does not re-edit Lynch’s film, combine it with others or turn it into an entertaining video clip, as so often happens today — Bogna Burska’s Rain in Paris and Tomasz Kozak’s Sex and Character are two examples from a single exhibition, Love and Democracy, Poznań, 2005. Instead, he reconstructs the interiors and locations in which Lynch’s action unfolds: corridors, bars and rooms. He translates a linear cinematic narrative into a simultaneous architectural one, a narrative whose protagonists are no longer the film’s characters but the viewers themselves. They enter spaces familiar from Lynch’s film, a reality suspended between cinema and the real, a world of cinematic fiction. Here, Tomaszewski has made real the dream of many artists working with new media. Jeffrey Shaw, director of the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, describes the art of the not-too-distant future as follows: thanks to digital technologies, “the artwork can become a simulation of reality, an immaterial cyberspace into which we will literally be able to enter. The viewer will no longer be a consumer in a mausoleum of objects, but a traveller and explorer within an audiovisual space of information. Each time, the interactive work will be shaped and co-created by the viewer’s activity.”

Christian Tomaszewski is a young artist, but he has already demonstrated that he is a master at creating unclear and unresolved situations that escape control. To enter the world of cinematic fiction is to find oneself on set, on a film set, to submit to the magic of cinema and the cinematic imagination that permeates contemporary reality, and to feel like an actor or at least a co-creator of the work. Yet to enter a world of cinematic fiction, to find oneself with Jeffrey and Sandy in Lumberton and become immersed in its dark world, is simultaneously to destroy the fiction and turn it into a theme park: instead of watching Walt Disney films, to go to Disneyland and walk down Main Street.

Tomaszewski makes fictions real, showing that our world is a product of the imagination and that the contemporary imaginary is cinematic in character. Analysing Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Norman Denzin concluded that postmodern individuals want films like Blue Velvet because they find in them their sex, their myths, their violence and their politics — in a word, their lives. Christian Tomaszewski allows us to enter this life and make it truly our own.

The title paraphrases the title of one of Christian Tomaszewski’s works.

Grzegorz Dziamski is a professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies of Adam Mickiewicz University and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań.