Beyond Film Form: Presence in the Film Form Workshop’s Practice

The most tangible trace of the Film Form Workshop’s activity today is the group’s rich and highly diverse body of work, comprising numerous films and photographs—including those documenting various actions and activities—as well as essays and video works. Almost all of them have already been analysed and discussed many times. Yet the possibilities for reading them still do not seem exhausted, as though attempts to interpret them came to a halt at some obstacle. Perhaps this is the austere form of most of these works. Perhaps the barrier is the language in which the artists themselves spoke about their work, since the Workshop’s members often, though not always, employed fairly hermetic terminology¹. As a result of these and perhaps other factors, many texts on the Film Form Workshop’s activity present a picture of artists engaged in conducting more or less abstracted, quasi-scientific experiments through media, detached from everyday life.

The group members’ actual aspirations, however, lay elsewhere. To understand them better and appreciate that the Workshop’s practice essentially concerned universal questions, we shall consider the issue of presence: the Workshop members’ personal, physical involvement in producing their works. Virtually from the beginning of the group’s existence, its members used tools such as still and film cameras, video cameras and outside-broadcast vehicles—and sometimes an entire television studio equipped with professional broadcasting technology—to carry out performative actions in which they participated personally. Let us therefore note this fact, because it was not, or was not always, neutral to the meaning of a given work. These works took various forms, including video installations, films and photographs. The group members’ varied approaches to their physicality as manifested in particular works are also important to our discussion.

In Józef Robakowski’s approach, physicality is therefore vitality: the body is a source of physical strength. For Andrzej Różycki, his own presence, the self-portrait appearing as a motif in a given work, may be interpreted as a personal, existentially charged gesture. Paweł Kwiek struggled to know reality, committing himself to exploring it totally and radically. Ryszard Waśko essentially reduced his own presence, but did so in a meaningful way, giving his works the form of a state of meditation. Through himself, through his self-portrait, Kazimierz Bendkowski told the viewer a story unfolding on the boundary between the subjective and objective, between reality and imagination.

Wojciech Bruszewski, who appeared infrequently in his works, created Ballet Language (1973), a piece rather distinct within the group’s output. A sequence of photographs and drawings depicts the naked artist using his image to construct a new alphabet. The work is one manifestation of Bruszewski’s broader investigations into language and forms of communication, but it also constitutes a rare example in Polish art of the male nude: a vital, young male body. The sequence of photographs forming Ballet Language resembles a photographic record of a shamanic dance in which every gesture has an assigned meaning known only to the initiated. If considered as a deliberate device on Bruszewski’s part, the nudity may be interpreted as an openness to communication and understanding beyond verbal transmission.

The self-portrait in Robakowski’s work evolved over the decades. It appeared in photographs during the 1960s. At the time, Robakowski often deconstructed prints bearing his likeness: for example, he singed them in such a way that the image of his face became incomplete. These photographs breathe anxiety and a palpable sense of existential threat that seems to disappear from the artist’s work in the following decade. In its place comes an awareness of his own physicality as a source of strength. For Robakowski, this discovery is linked with the foregrounding of connections between that physicality and media—specifically their tools, chiefly film cameras, which the artist uses as though they were extensions of his body. Importantly, genuine physical strength was truly necessary for him to work with them in this way: cameras were heavy, and the cinematographic material of the period offered determined resistance. This distinctive struggle, this testing of who was testing whom—the camera testing the person or the person testing the camera—led Robakowski to create works that recorded a certain paradox: struggle and cooperation occurring simultaneously. The image recorded on film results from the partly overcome resistance of a device that appears to submit to the operator-performer, yet never ceases to record reality according to its predetermined programme. First clearly posed in the film I’m Going (35 mm, 1973), this problem would over time become one of the most important strands in Robakowski’s practice. Many works based on this method form the broad, open-ended series Biological-Mechanical Recordings, which encompasses not only films but also photographs and video works. The essence of this way of thinking is Exercise for Two Hands (1976), which functions as a triptych consisting of a portrait of the performer-author holding operating cameras in his hands. The double image recorded by them completes the whole, allowing us to encounter Robakowski’s artistic practice. In this work, he steps outside the role of camera operator and reveals himself to the viewer as a subject existing in reality who confronts, indeed challenges it.

In a certain sense, Ryszard Waśko and his works stand at the opposite pole of this strategy. The artist adopted an analytical approach to the phenomena of time and space, whose relationship was an important source of his creative investigation. Crucially for this strand of Waśko’s practice, however, it could not be pursued in isolation from his own being. His works, chiefly films and videos, are therefore in fact records not so much of the relation ‘time–space’ as of ‘time–space–I’. Here, ‘I’ is understood literally as a physical subject existing in time and space. This subject usually remains invisible to us, but their presence is perceptible because what we see is visible to us thanks to Waśko’s presence in a given place at a given time. Such is the case, for example, with the photograph From 0 to 180 Degrees (1971), a record of the downward-to-upward movement of the head of a subject looking at and perceiving reality.

Waśko usually withdrew from the viewer’s field of vision, although he also employed different solutions. The subject reveals himself to us, for example, in the film 30 Sound Situations (1975), which can be, and usually is, read as a distinctive summation of the artist’s investigations into the possibilities of representing space in film: an analysis of the relationship between sound and space in a film recording. Yet 30 Situations… can also be read as a manifestation of complete presence, a presence taking place ‘here and now’. I incline towards this understanding of the work, all the more because Waśko, consciously or unconsciously, employed a gesture resembling one used in Zen practice. To produce sound that resonated through different spaces—the process, the variation in sound according to the surroundings, generally forms the work’s principal axis—Waśko used small wooden boards attached to his hands. The sound was produced by clapping. Repeated thirty times, this action recalls striking the floor with a stick during meditation practice in a zendō. There, the blow is intended to help practitioners meditate by restoring the meditator’s awareness of the here and now. A similar role can be discerned in Waśko’s clapping gesture. Like Robakowski in Exercise for Two Hands, Waśko reveals his practice in 30 Sound Situations and identifies himself with it through self-presentation, the simple device of showing himself before the camera. The depth of the work rests on a subtle nuance: the artist’s surroundings change from shot to shot—one may be an empty corridor, another a crowded street—and this change, like the artist’s presence in the film, is important, forming one of the film’s axes, because the sound of one hand striking the other as it travels through space changes with it. The subject himself remains unchanged. What happens around him does not visibly affect him, but neither does he ignore it. 30 Sound Situations resembles an image of the nature of zazen meditation, in which we notice everything happening at a given moment and register it in a state of complete attentiveness, yet remain unaffected by it.

At around the same time, during a stay by several members of the Film Form Workshop in Antwerp, Waśko created the video installation Space Beyond (1976). Like 30 Situations…, it too captures the presence of a subject-performer, whom this time we cannot see but can hear and whose gaze we then follow. Remaining outside the field of vision of a stationary camera, the artist traces the outline of the gallery with a felt-tip pen, ‘defining’ and describing the space he occupies and thereby marking his presence in it in a highly restrained manner. The next stage involved repeating with the camera the route initially followed with the pen, while paying close attention to this visible trace of his presence. Waśko himself meaningfully compares the moment of working on the installation to a state of meditation that led him to an authentically experienced sense of existing here and now².

In Kazimierz Bendkowski’s work, by contrast, presence and the self-portrait form the visual axis and centre of his activity. The artist used his own image in order, as he declared, to analyse through this example our susceptibility to manipulation by means of the photographic image and to investigate the relativity of visual communication³. Bendkowski worked for years on a single evolving series, Relative Image. A recurring motif in many of its photographs is the artist’s self-portrait, presented in sequences of several prints. Each shows the same view of his face, accompanied by a different comment. Once again, the choice of the series’ principal motif should not be ignored. Because it is the artist’s face, Bendkowski views Relative Image not so much, or not only, as a reflection on the properties of the photographic medium, but rather as an attempt to establish the relationship between himself and the world. At the same time, the series may be understood as an anticipation of today’s ubiquitous phenomenon of the selfie, or as its distinctive ‘mock-up’. Selfies are usually taken alone, when no one else is present to take our photograph. Increasingly, they are taken compulsively, including to check what we look like, replacing a glance in a pocket mirror. In the selfies we share on social media, we generally look better than we do in reality. We commonly create our own avatars; this has already become a cultural norm. Bendkowski’s self-portrait Relative Images ironically expose this process. The ostentatious multiplication of his own image, which essentially remains the same and changes only apparently through the addition of ever different comments, reverses the mechanism by which the selfie is created and functions, and also unmasks it. Both examples of the photograph’s use, although seemingly remote from one another, show that we are readily manipulated, susceptible to verbal persuasion and prepared to see what others suggest to us.

The convention changes in the Gold series. Although it remains part of Relative Image, it stands out decisively from the other photographs and from the rest of the Film Form Workshop’s entire oeuvre. Bendkowski created a kind of astonishing comic strip in which he himself is the protagonist. The individual prints form a story of the hero’s struggles or adventures with an element that Bendkowski subsequently applied to the prints in gold paint. The coloured shape sometimes resembles a rope that the figure of the artist climbs or that binds him. At times it resembles a ball, at others a sack that Bendkowski supposedly carries on his back. It may be something the comic-strip figure eats, or something Bendkowski spits out. In some photographs, a golden triangle ‘crushes’ the hero or a presumed golden liquid ‘floods’ him. Like the Workshop’s other members, Bendkowski seeks to activate and involve the viewer in the creative process. The viewer’s imagination can be set in motion through the simple mechanism of introducing an unexpected and indeterminate element into the photograph, which each of us is inclined to see differently. Regardless of how we ultimately interpret the added golden shapes, the artist appears in the photographs in various situations in which he struggles with something, is restrained or crushed by something, is flooded by it, or has to wrestle with it, for example by pulling on a supposed rope. The fact that we are dealing with an added, secondary element applied to the photographs by Bendkowski’s hand means that the Gold series can be interpreted as the artist’s attempt to visualise his psychophysical states. Such a reading makes Bendkowski appear as an artist interested fundamentally not so much in analysing visible reality as in examining a reality beyond the reach of human senses: one that exists but that we can neither see nor touch.

Andrzej Różycki used his own image relatively rarely, but his works based on self-portraits may be recognised as personally charged. The two important works in question were created in the medium of photography and are built upon an analytical approach to it. At the same time, however, by weaving his own figure into the works and playing with meaningful titles, Różycki speaks about himself, his artistic attitude and his approach to life.

Thus, the point of departure for the multi-part photograph Project to Set the Photographic Image in Motion: Icarus (1975) is a full-length self-portrait of the artist, multiplied in subsequent images so that it recalls film frames stopped and superimposed upon one another. The successive prints present different variants of the replicated and overlaid figure of the work’s author, while its symptomatic title provides the summation: like Icarus’s flight, this attempt to set the image in motion cannot succeed. With this gesture, and with his characteristic distance and a degree of irony, Różycki sums up the numerous efforts and utopian attempts, his own and those of his fellow group members, to extract the impossible from photography.

Another work by Różycki marked by the subject’s presence is Apparent Identification (1973). Created as part of ‘Workshop Action’ at the Museum of Art in Łódź in 1973, it combined photography—in the form of slides depicting Różycki performing various simple activities, such as reading and tearing a newspaper or playing with a ball—with film, which this time recorded the artist repeating those activities, and a performative action: another repetition, now ‘live’, of the gestures and activities recorded in the film and photographs. The film projection, slide projection and performative action unfolded against a wall that served as a screen. All three layers appeared on this screen simultaneously. As a result, the viewer received a surprising three-dimensional image that broke off as film, only to be completed by photography, which in turn transformed into an action involving Różycki. The work may be read both on the level of the artist’s personal situation and as a work with a universal dimension. Still relevant more than four decades after its creation, perhaps even more so today than then, it concerns a world in which we must coexist alongside our digital avatars. The vision of life confronting someone who observes a virtual double often differs significantly from the existence we actually lead. Like those in Apparent Identification, these multiplied beings have points in common, but the question must nevertheless arise: which version is real, and can we still speak of reality at all? The tension generated by the work is partly neutralised by the banality of the trivial gestures Różycki chose to construct the situation of Apparent Identification. This is a characteristic device in his practice: serious questions raised in a serious tone are then undercut by a distinctive joke. Reality is complex; it may be made familiar not only by deconstructing the programmes of the machines taking over our world, but also through human distance from it. Różycki wrote about Apparent Identification: ‘At the root of every filmmaker’s activity there must have been a dream: to extend the lives of screen characters beyond the measurable projection time counted out by the physical length of the film stock. Every director pursued this by attacking the viewer as suggestively as possible with image and sound. This device allowed the audience—after the lights came on—to retain the created film characters in their memory. Before the projection of my film, I hung on the screen a photographic image of the film’s protagonist, the same size as the image produced by projection. The projection began with these two figures—the photographic and the filmic—perfectly overlapping. Through changes to the film camera’s aperture, alterations to the background, the substitution of other people, editing and so on, the film image diverged increasingly from the suggested, static photographic image, until finally the film image became a pure stream of light from the projector, illuminating the photograph on the screen and giving the impression that the projection continued. After the lights came on, the photographic image continued to exist. Alongside these photochemical records and their relative existences, a living protagonist was present during the projection, additionally animating himself within the two superimposed images. The moment when the photograph was removed from the screen remained unclear, because the photographic image could hang there for any length of time’⁴.

In Paweł Kwiek’s practice, the self-portrait and his own presence are motifs connecting different periods of his work and different media. Kwiek uses the self-portrait, particularly in photographic works, continually, almost compulsively. This working method resembles an ongoing test, although it has nothing to do with exploring his physicality and is rather a verification of his own capacity to perceive the world. Throughout Kwiek’s activity in the Workshop, what is at stake in his practice is an understanding of reality, or perhaps rather an attempt to grasp his relationship with that reality.

The fullest manifestation of this attitude is found in the video works Paweł Kwiek made at a Polish Television studio in 1974. A television spectacle was produced in which Kwiek himself, as a performer issuing instructions to operators working with three cameras, influenced the image of reality the viewers would receive. Through commands given to the team, Kwiek created a broadcast composed of fragmentary images of the situation unfolding in the studio. The first and most immediately apparent aspect of this work is the problem of our perceiving reality through media: this reception of the world, which is of course becoming increasingly common, will always be incomplete and fragmentary. Moreover, the work’s meaning becomes stronger when we recall that the artist viewed video technology as a tool closely resembling the structure of the human mind. Analysing his video works, Kwiek wrote: ‘(…) We therefore have a tool that operates like our imagination, like a mind that reviews images perceived, remembered or currently being produced.’ The video A. Studio Situation is therefore a distinctive unmasking of media, which fragment reality while transmitting an image of it. Kwiek’s action, however, also unmasks the weakness of the human mind, habitually accustomed to perceiving reality analytically and fragmentarily, from different points of view, but not holistically, never in full.

Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (1870–1966), a professor of Buddhist philosophy and pioneer in promoting Zen Buddhism in the West, wrote: ‘The scientific method of examining reality is to see an object from the so-called objective point of view’⁵. At this point, Suzuki offered the example of a flower as a possible object of analysis, which might be a botanical, chemical or physical inquiry. A scientific approach to reality means speaking about it, and consequently our analyses of the flower yield analytically formulated definitions derived from observations conducted from different points of view. Analyses of the flower resemble fragments of the television studio’s reality watched on their television screens by viewers of the programme prepared by the Film Form Workshop. This kind of analysis is sufficient for practical purposes, but the essence of the subject, according to the philosopher, eludes cognition.

Suzuki contrasted two attitudes through the lyrical subjects in a poem by Alfred Tennyson and the famous haiku by Matsuo Bashō⁶. In the first case, we encounter an attempt to know a flower objectively; for this purpose, it is pulled out by the roots. The situation captured by Matsuo in his haiku, by contrast, records an attempt to know the flower by ‘embracing’ it completely through understanding, to the point that knower and known become identified with one another. In this situation, no further analysis is necessary, because the division between internal and external disappears and, going further, so does the division between the world and the subject perceiving it.

Kwiek’s slightly later work resonates powerfully with precisely this attitude. In Video and Breath: Information Channel (1978), the artist sits in a half-lotus position, evoking obvious associations with one of the postures recommended for meditation, and is connected to a television set by a wire attached with adhesive tape at one end to the performer’s chest and at the other to the television knob controlling the monitor’s brightness. The artist’s action consists practically only of breathing—by breathing, Kwiek influenced the brightness of the television image—and looking. Sitting ‘in lotus’, the artist saw his image on the television screen. The work is essentially built not upon action, but upon the reduction of action almost entirely to a manifested, conscious presence. Video and Breath echoes the attitude of the lyrical subject in Matsuo’s haiku: a person who sees reality in all its manifestations without judging it, but with complete awareness, understanding rather than analysing. This is a clear change in the relationship between reality and the subject receiving it, a change manifested in Kwiek’s activity over the course of just a few years. Initially using new media as tools for knowing reality, Kwiek ultimately confronted the world and perceived it virtually directly, gradually relinquishing all props. By the end of the 1970s, he had definitively abandoned quasi-scientific language and created a work that consisted of meditating before a smooth white wall, whose only trace is modest photographic documentation⁷.

Józef Robakowski was probably writing about precisely such a change at the level of consciousness, one that was to become the Workshop’s experience, when he stated: ‘(…) Our concern was never to “extend visibility through technical devices”, but to change the perception of the world and thus the way of thinking. That is a fundamental difference’⁸.

[The text is taken from the author’s forthcoming book Film Form Workshop, to be published by Fundacja Arton and Sternberg Press in early 2017]

*Dr Marika Kuźmicz is an art historian, curator, writer and editor of books on art. Since 2010, she has run Fundacja Arton, a non-profit organisation devoted to researching and promoting Polish art of the 1970s. She lectures at Collegium Civitas and the University of Warsaw, teaching the history of new media and the history of video art.

¹ This was the case, for example, with the artists’ own descriptions of the Workshop’s films, which were often accompanied by various diagrams and calculations; see, among others: R. Waśko, Film Form Workshop (master’s thesis), Leon Schiller State Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre in Łódź, Łódź 1974; material available on the Fundacja Arton website: https://repozytorium.amu.edu.pl/bitstream/10593/10979/1/04_Lechosław_Olszewski_Działalność_warsztatu_formy_filmowej_111-155.pdf

² Email correspondence between R. Waśko and M. Kuźmicz, 12–13 August 2016.
³ Correspondence between K. Bendkowski and M. Kuźmicz, August–September 2016; see also: K. Bendkowski, Relativity and Objectivity of Visual Communications, [in:] R. W. Kluszczyński, Film Form Workshop, Centre for Contemporary Art—Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw 2000, pp. 62–64.
⁴ A. Różycki, Apparent Identification, [in:] R. Waśko, Film Form Workshop, op. cit., p. 68 [secondary numbering, M.K.].
⁵ D. T. Suzuki, The Concept of the Self, [in:] E. Fromm, D. T. Suzuki, R. de Martino, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, Poznań 2011, p. 48.
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ P. Kwiek, Perception of the Absence of Differences (1979).
⁸ J. Robakowski, A Hole in History.., [in:] ‘Studia Artystyczne CDN’ 1980 (Book 2), pp. 76–78.