A Visual Journey

Rafał Jakubowicz’s works are customarily placed within two separate fields: there is the realm of Holocaust Memory and there is, to put it in the broadest possible terms and with enormous abbreviation, a discussion with the history of twentieth-century art. Critics introduce this division, the artist himself accepts it, and the texts in this catalogue also arrange themselves along these lines, almost of their own accord. I once told Rafał Jakubowicz in conversation that he was a Guardian of Memory. This is both a burden and a difficult undertaking. A burden for obvious reasons; difficult because it is not easy to find a way of speaking about the Holocaust. The Holocaust belongs more to the domain of Memory than to that of Language. An account is impossible, whereas Memory endures: dispersed and discontinuous, but nevertheless vivid—and non-discursive. An account is deaf, always inadequate, always incommensurable. Memory can be inherited and taken up. (In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt wrote that the one thing we cannot convey or recount is pain, the most private of human experiences, incommunicable in the public realm. I deliberately do not wish to develop this thought, interpret it or relate it to the experience of the Holocaust. I leave it to anyone who wishes to take it up.) Born after the war and undertaking the effort of remembrance, we shall never know what incommensurability means, what it means to be unable to give an account. Yet those born after the war, free from the duty of giving an account—and only they—have, by a historical paradox, the chance to create signs of Memory. Rafał Jakubowicz writes about their works in his critical essays: Bałka, Janicka and Tuymans are conscious choices. These are people who have chosen a path similar to Jakubowicz’s in his works concerning history. Similar, though not entirely and not in every respect. In this text I would like to grasp the distinctiveness of Jakubowicz’s stance and decisions in his works referring to the history of the Holocaust—this is one aim; the second, closely linked to the first, is to deal with the division between two spheres of artistic activity: the history of the Holocaust and the history of art (or art revising art’s recent past)—in other words, to look at Jakubowicz’s work to date from a different point of view than the one usually adopted.

In reviews of successive solo exhibitions (Form, 2004, Foksal Gallery; ArtKills, 2005, Pies Gallery, Poznań; MittelWeiß, 2005, Foksal Gallery; one hundred and eightyandsomething, 2005, Okna Gallery, CCA Warsaw; The Cabinet, 2006, Entropia Gallery), I read about references to Unism, Minimalism, Conceptualism and geometric abstraction, to Warhol and Yves Klein. These references do of course exist, on many levels, in all their complexity and dialectical perversity. They set erudite chains of association in motion, allowing us to play games with our own aesthetic knowledge, or simply to play with it. A subtle game and a sophisticated amusement. One might go a step further in constructing references and say that this was how the savvies of the 1980s played, learning from Las Vegas or reading The Nameof the Rose. I write this without irony; I am merely indicating a moment in art when such games reached their culmination before, after the turning point, settling more or less quietly along the timeline.

But history does not disappear; it is present in a literal way. Jakubowicz’s works are no longer references to the past or dense erudite weaves, but rather the taking up of historical presences. A historical present. An extensive diachronic and synchronic context—in other words, simultaneity. Thus something different, contemporary—in both senses of the word. Contemporary as ‘corresponding to our time’ and contemporary as ‘historical simultaneity’. History rendered in real time, to use a term from cyberculture. Alongside this is an enormous sensitivity to context. And it is perhaps this sensitivity that allows history to become present—to be present and of the present in several ways. In the exhibition Form at Foksal Gallery, medicine packages became a series of small geometric abstractions, while the series of geometric abstractions proved to be transformed medicine packages. The relationship worked both ways. It was impossible to say what was ‘from’ and what was ‘to’. A fluid animation (a short film forming part of the exhibition and showing two tablets dissolving in a glass of water), or morphing and special effects. A penetrating comment on the history of Foksal Gallery that, before our eyes, becomes a comment on obsessive fitness culture, the medical services industry (no longer the pharmaceutical industry in the traditional sense) and our narcotic dependence on medicines.

Each of Jakubowicz’s exhibitions is a comprehensive project, a coherent statement and an organised space. Upon entering Foksal Gallery’s small room during the exhibition MittelWeiß, unprepared viewers saw nothing but white walls: an empty interior ready to receive the Work. The semantic level of the piece revealed itself afterwards, once one knew that the walls were covered in white Mittel Weiß wallpaper and noticed the small white painting in the corridor—white on white, a crafted, realist depiction of actual wallpaper, but also a story about the Gallery, gallery-ness and Painting—painting-as-painting and painting turned inside out—or, put differently, a story about pure painting. Visuality was negated here in order to return with real force. It said: you see nothing; you do not know what you see; you see in the mind. You must rationalise the whiteness, fill the void. Now you may leave. Thank you for visiting. Norman Klein introduced the concept of scriptedspace1 into cultural theory. As I understand the author’s intention, these are multimedia spaces (as we would call them today), arranged from beginning to end according to a precise scenario (hence the term scripted), ‘written’ or ‘overwritten’ by different means and in different techniques: the artificial, simulated spaces of shopping malls, theme parks, entertainment centres and computer games. In his book, Klein goes back to Renaissance illusions and the Baroque; he writes about the spaces of nineteenth-century cities (continuing Benjamin’s reflections in his own way), theatrical and operatic sets, and the film set. In Mittel Weiß, Jakubowicz erases the script of the conventional gallery space in order to reinforce it and transfer it ‘into the mind’, which we, the viewers, obediently do, reconstructing for ourselves the symbolic scenario of the art space. Mittel Weiß is a visual essay (it remains so, however paradoxical that may sound) about perception, intellectual habits and art’s self-referentiality, but also about the construction of staged spaces. The simulated gallery space and the ‘empty’ project space interpenetrate. At first we are surprised by the absence of a script; a sense of emptiness appears, which we gradually fill with different recognitions, convinced that we will succeed in closing the space and reconstructing its self-referential scenario2.

In one hundred and eightyandsomething, a work given a light, offhand title, there is a fence of precisely that height, with stones beneath it on which one may stand, peer over the barrier and watch a film of an identical situation recorded in the city: people climb up to see what is happening on a building site screened from curious eyes by boards. Somewhere in the background, like a quiet allusion, the roof of the National Museum in Poznań is visible. I remember how, many years ago, one of the great ladies of Polish art history described during a seminar her ‘pilgrimage’ to the door with a peephole at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, behind which Duchamp’s Étant Donnés is concealed. This was at a time when no one in Poland was interested in the revisions being undertaken in the new art history. We knew nothing of the early theories of second-wave feminism, which began with analyses of the function of the gaze; we had not yet read Foucault’s Disciplineand Punish; no one considered the relationships between power and looking. Now that surveillance and monitoring are ubiquitous, we are no longer (perhaps) quite so unreflective. In any case, one hundred and eighty and something does not merely point to voyeurism and rubbernecking as inalienable formulas of modernist ‘communion with art’. For me it does much more—this is how I wish to see the work—by making us aware of the relationship between recording and surveillance. Jakubowicz recorded unsuspecting onlookers, whom we then watch, justified by the context of the exhibition.

The relationship between looking, recording and surveillance is not unambiguous: recording is ubiquitous and commonplace. Available to anyone with a mobile phone, it can be a form of control, but also one of individual defence and protection. It may also provide grassroots information, resistance to the controlling matrix3. All of us (at least those from privileged countries, or those such as Poland situated at the margins of the privileged sphere) are immersed in the same global system of visibility and accessibility: this is the politics of looking implemented by means of advanced technologies.

In ArtKills, Jakubowicz paraphrased the warnings printed on cigarette packets. ‘Art seriously harms you and others around you’; ‘Making art is highly addictive—do not start’; ‘Your doctor or psychologist can help you give up art’; ‘Protect children—do not make them look at contemporary art’; ‘Artists die younger’. The cards bearing these slogans are the same size as the notices on cigarette packets; the same typeface and black borders are used—they are faithful replicas, with only the wording paraphrased. During the exhibition, the cards served as captions beneath white pictures outlined in black. Blank obituary notices on which smokers’ names might appear. Put differently: blank pictures on which the objects of the definitions below them have not yet appeared. The definitions are also potential stickers, just as the obituary notices hang in a state of potentiality. I am writing this with an opened packet of cigarettes beside me on the desk, bearing the slogan: ‘Smoking can cause a slow and painful death’. Under the authority of an appropriate regulation or law, a person unfortunate enough to smoke is terrorised daily by the prospect of death, while tobacco companies protect themselves against paying astronomical damages. Contemporary art has been the object of constant attacks in Poland for years. This ‘art’ under attack is a phantasmagorical construct of the philistine mind, like the phantasmagorical ‘Jew’ and the equally phantasmagorical ‘commie’ lurking everywhere. There is no single ‘contemporary art’; only a phantasmagoria can be attacked, without knowledge or awareness of the kinds of revisions continually taking place within art itself and cultural theory. Why am I explaining this, and to whom? I am not defending ‘art’; I am defending plurality and freedom of expression.

Art Kills—like most of Jakubowicz’s works, perhaps all of them—is multilayered and may be read and interpreted at different levels: as a critique of the art world; a visualisation of the various mechanisms of control and repression embedded in everyday life; an artistic joke and conceptual sticker-making. I find it difficult to name another artist capable of opening their work to such a load of references, operating so freely with different techniques while using minimal visual means, and moving simultaneously through different contexts: artistic, political, everyday, critical and historical. And here a doubt occurs to me: does ‘distinguishing contexts’ make sense? Does it explain anything, and can the distinction be sustained? I cannot answer directly, so I shall take a roundabout route. The modernist artist appeared on the symbolic market only after proposing a language of their own, developing a clear and recognisable logo and a new brand, thereby participating in the development and accumulation of cultural goods.

A visual work had to be accompanied by exegesis. The artist did not merely ‘create’; they also—and perhaps above all—provided an interpretation of their own work and constructed the theory upon which the image rested, something we readily forget because it is so obvious that it escapes notice. The painting of the postmodernist interval was a play of signifiers, a carnival of masks. At the same time, in the 1980s, above all in English-speaking countries, intellectually accomplished artists well versed in cultural theory began to make themselves heard: critical of the system, writing no longer manifestos and treatises on new visions of art but analytical texts revising the current state of culture, aware of art’s entanglement in power games and alert to the oppressiveness of dominant discourses—activists and public intellectuals (someone may say, with some justification, that in the United States this tradition goes back to the 1930s).

Peter Lunenfeld, a Californian theorist of new media, introduces the term visual intellectuality—not intellectualism, but intellectuality, like sensibility: visual acuity or intellectual sensibility, which unfortunately sounds awkward in Polish. However it sounds, such a term would have been inconceivable only a few years ago, as Lunenfeld notes before defining the growing number of people he regards as visual intellectuals: ‘[They are] people who make visual culture, reflect upon it and write about it simultaneously, though not in order to assert its superiority. They create the visual culture surrounding us, which over the past hundred years has gradually displaced text. It is easy to discredit this process with the cliché of the silent image’s triumph over the eloquent word. We have probably long since moved beyond that narrative […] there are ever more works demonstrating that complex arguments, sophisticated critique and even languages of praise are generated outside a discourse based exclusively on text4.

It may seem strange to apply the term visual intellectual to an artist who so radically reduces the visual message, bringing it almost to zero and carrying it beyond the sphere of visibility. The spaces Jakubowicz uses for his works become non-spaces; the script disappears, and so does the narrative. In the visual sphere surrounding us every day, we encounter hyper-narrativity: everything must be stated, itemised and closed. Seuchensperrgebiet is a billboard that appeared on the wall of a Kraków tenement house in 2002. A white background and a fading, indistinct inscription, as if the ribbon in a typewriter had dried out or worn away. If someone looked at it, they were unlikely to understand the word’s meaning, translate it and place it in the appropriate context. And if they looked without understanding, they may have treated the inscription as a teaser and waited for the explanation, the actual advertisement bearing the logo of the company promoting its product. This is how we pass by the history of the Holocaust every day; one need not travel to Auschwitz in order to reflect on it. Trauma is everywhere—one need only look and see. Jakubowicz speaks about this in the interview entitled A Way of Thinking, conducted by Justyna Kowalska and included in this catalogue. To observe, look, see, penetrate the layers of script and hyper-narrative with one’s gaze, and respond wherever a response is possible—this is visual intellectualism and visual sensibility. Jakubowicz, I believe, does not treat art as a mission—a ‘creative culmination of existence’—nor is it the practice of a profession. Art is instead a tool, an instrument that makes it possible to enter public space and speak out, an instrument that introduces a hiatus into habitual perception—and perception is most often habitual; that is a truism.

When Jakubowicz was preparing The Cabinet, a series of fourteen portraits of culture ministers,

who held office from 1989 to 2005, he had difficulty assembling the photographs. The faces in the portraits fade away, barely visible grey apparitions against a white background. There are no names beneath the portraits, only the dates of the terms of office engraved on brass plaques. Rightly so, because it is—or should be—the office and the manner in which it is held that matter; what I am called is of little consequence. Someone compared the series to Warhol’s portraits. Warhol depicts celebrities; Jakubowicz’s series shows people from an entirely different world—anti-celebrities. It is a story about the public sphere, the media and power in Poland. Ti tabu dibu daj—the title of the exhibition at Atlas Sztuki—is taken from the refrain of a silly, primitive disco-polo song. I could not resist searching online; here are the lyrics of the entire song5. Jakubowicz says it is not important, not necessarily important. I insist that it is: it reveals a state of mind. And Jakubowicz traces and recounts that state of mind.

1. Norman Klein, TheVaticantoVegas:TheHistoryofSpecialEffects, New York 2004.
2. Not only self-referential. In one of her texts on Jakubowicz, Justyna Kowalska offers the following interpretation: ‘It is difficult to resist looking at MittelWeiß through the prism of the earlier works as well, and applying a historical filter to the abstract work, particularly since this is another German-language title. From this perspective, the motif of emptiness, a crucial element of “art after Auschwitz”, becomes significant.’ (Justyna Kowalska, RafałJakubowicz:pułapkaiwładza, ‘Obieg’ 2 [74] 2006, p. 27).
3. In her article Regarding the Torture of Others (Lewą Nogą, 17/05, translated by Ewa Mikina, electronic version http://www.iwkip.org/lewanoga/) ), Susan Sontag writes that it was only thanks to the mass online circulation of the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison that they became widely known, preventing the Bush administration from covering up the affair.
4. See Peter Lunenfeld, VisualIntellectualsandNetworkedIdeals, paper presented at the conference InterfacingKnowledge:NewParadigmsforComputingintheHumanities,ArtsandSocialScience, 8–10 March 2002, University of California Santa Barbara, http://dcmrg.english.ucsb.edu/conference/2002/docu-ments/peter_lunenfeld.htm
5. It’s Saturday now, the evening’s beginning

Thoughts spin round in my head, what a bloody great girl

Soon you’ll be getting her into bed

It’ll go smooth as ice, then a number in the car…

Hey, what a night!

She’s all yours, you’re rocking her You’ll be blowing hard until the morning

Then goodbye, and in your thoughts—get lost, babe

Now hands in the air, ti tabu dibu daj The crowd is partying tonight, ti tabu dibu daj

Because nothing hurts here, ti tabu dibu daj

No fucking about on the dance floor, ti tabu dibu daj

The disco isn’t over, nobody sits down

The party’s just beginning, everybody’s having fun

Everyone is dancing, jumping and singing

The crowd goes wild and knocks back strong drinks

Hey, what a night!

She’s all yours, you’re rocking her You’ll be blowing hard until the morning

Then goodbye, and in your thoughts—get lost, babe

Now hands in the air, ti tabu dibu daj The crowd is partying tonight, ti tabu dibu daj

Because nothing hurts here, ti tabu dibu daj

No fucking about on the dance floor, ti tabu dibu daj Hands in the air!

What a night!

She’s all yours, you’re rocking her You’ll be blowing hard until the morning

Then goodbye, and in your thoughts—get lost, babe

Now hands in the air, ti tabu dibu daj The crowd is partying tonight, ti tabu dibu daj

Because nothing hurts here, ti tabu dibu daj

No fucking about on the dance floor, ti tabu dibu daj

Now hands in the air, ti tabu dibu daj

The crowd is partying tonight, ti tabu dibu daj

Because nothing hurts here, ti tabu dibu daj

No fucking about on the dance floor, ti tabu dibu daj http://justyska220993.wrzuta.pl/audio/qQ7Ysb2Jjt/boys_-_biba