A Way of Thinking

Justyna Kowalska: What do the words of the song invoked in the exhibition title mean to you?

Rafał Jakubowicz: Nothing, really. The exhibition title is quite abstract. A friend, Mikołaj, once hummed ‘Ti tabu dibu daj’ in an ironic context. It is the chorus of a bawdy disco polo song by the band Boys—a hit called Biba [laughter]. The exhibition rooms of Atlas Sztuki will be perversely transformed into sports halls. In one of them I shall make a series of wicker sculptures referring to aerobics, in which music, as we know, plays an important role. There will be no music, however. Paradoxically, though, it will be present in some way through the title. I think disco polo has aged with dignity. It used to be the height of embarrassment. Now disco polo parties take place in fashionable, exclusive clubs. Disco polo has become almost cool [laughter].

J.K.: On the one hand you address difficult, tragic historical subjects; on the other you surprise us with an abstract sense of humour. Where do such radically different subjects in your work come from?

R.J.: I cannot explain it convincingly. I have no programme of work and do not pursue a particular artistic strategy in which every successive step is planned and can be sensibly explained. I move rather intuitively. I simply respond to what, for various reasons, catches my attention. Perhaps there is another reason too. Making works that touch on difficult subjects consumes a great deal of energy. It entails considerable pressure and psychological strain. Sometimes, then, one has to decompress by working on a light project. Yet I try to ensure that even the lighter works are not empty. Although the exhibition room is sometimes almost empty [laughter].

J.K.: Why do you address history?

R.J.: I address various subjects, not only history. But labelling is—as I realise—unavoidable. There is always a danger of being pigeonholed. After two works, audiences think they already know what to expect at an artist's next exhibition. Sometimes they are proved right, sometimes not. If not, the charge of inconsistency is easily made [laughter]. Once, around the time of the exhibitions Mittel Weiß at Foksal Gallery and one hundred and eighty something at Okna Gallery in Ujazdowski Castle, a woman from television told me that she was surprised: knowing my earlier works, including Arbeitsdisziplin, Seuchensperrgebiet and Swimming Pool, she had not expected me to make an amusing project that was a kind of joke, a light-hearted game with the audience. It is important not to become hostage to one's own position, not to bring about a situation in which any free and spontaneous movement becomes impossible. I try to evade easy classification. A label is always a burden. From the audience's perspective, it is a shortcut to an easy and superficial interpretation. This is undoubtedly a problem—a serious problem. Why do I reach into history? I am interested in apparently ordinary, neutral places that suddenly and unexpectedly reveal a chain of disturbing associations, summoning the shadows of the past. Places containing various tensions that can be extracted and revealed through a simple, decisive gesture that changes the existing optics. Passing the Volkswagen factory in Antoninek near Poznań, I noticed the top of the fence: barbed wire. I decided to take a photograph and record a film. Passing the former Poznań synagogue on Wroniecka Street, which still functions as a municipal swimming pool, I decided to project the Hebrew word ‘swimming pool’ onto the building's façade, immediately above the Polish sign ‘municipal swimming pool’, and also record a film documenting the nature of its interior. It is worth adding that these are places I see almost every day from a bus or tram window. I did not invent these works. They are, as it were, my visual reactions and responses to existing situations—a kind of intervention. When I perceive a tension, when something troubles me, I want to share that observation or unease with the viewer. I then search for the most appropriate, convincing and resonant form. This requires a certain acuity, sensitivity and, above all, vigilance. I do not exploit places marked by the memory of the Holocaust in my work. I have visited Auschwitz-Birkenau several times, alone. But I took no photographs there. It seemed wrong and inappropriate, although almost everyone around me was taking pictures. I felt that taking photographs violated the peace and solemnity of the place. I overcame that reluctance and took a few photographs only when I went there most recently with Haim Maor, an artist from Israel, who was also taking pictures. One does not have to travel to Auschwitz—the traces of the Holocaust can be found everywhere, including in our supposedly safe world. Reality is marked, or rather stigmatised, by the trauma of the past. The slightest disturbance is enough to bring forth what had remained concealed beneath the surface of ‘normality’. This does not concern only the space around us. The clichés are within us. They are imprinted on us. We carry them and perceive reality through them, often without even realising it. Why does a modern Volkswagen factory, the pride of Poznań's inhabitants, evoke Auschwitz so unequivocally? Why, when watching the film Swimming Pool, in which showers appear, do we think of the nightmare of the gas chambers? They are only ordinary showers. These visual associations are in our minds and will remain there forever. We are burdened by them. I do not feel like an artist of history. Indeed, I resist such a simple label. Nevertheless, history keeps returning. After all, I live in a country where apparently neutral places preserve tragic traces, a country where fatal associations are inevitable. Several years ago, while visiting the area of the Warsaw Ghetto, I noticed a sandpit near Miła Street. I took a photograph. The sandpit was terribly neglected and empty—there were no children around. Grey blocks of flats and an oppressive silence. When Krystyna Piotrowska invited me to the exhibition Próżna Street 2006, I decided to find that sandpit again after a long interval. I went to the same place and found a flower bed. That is, the sandpit had been transformed into an overgrown, badly neglected garden that looked like a forgotten grave. Evidently a sandpit was no longer needed there at all. I recorded a film: an almost static image, nearly a photograph. Only occasionally does a branch of a nearby tree, a leaf or a blade of grass move; someone passes, or rather slips by. I juxtaposed the film with a poignant quotation from Janusz Korczak's diary: ‘If you do not believe in the soul, you must surely accept that your body will live on as green grass, as a cloud. You are, after all, water and dust.’

J.K.: Have you noticed increased interest in the Holocaust in Polish art in recent years? How might it be explained?

R.J.: Recently, I think, the media have indeed spoken more and more openly about the Holocaust. The debate in Poland around Jedwabne proved crucial—a breaking of the silence. It was an opportunity to look back courageously, including at shameful pages of history. Yet in society, I feel, nothing has changed. Every generation must confront the darkness of the past in its own way. I know of only one work concerning Jedwabne, by Zofia Lipecka. Have recent years brought increased interest in the Holocaust in Polish art? It is difficult to say. There are works by Bałka, Libera, Żmijewski and Janicka. Is that many or few? In 1995, Anda Rottenberg organised the important and widely discussed exhibition Where Is Abel, Thy Brother? at Zachęta. It was not until ten years later, in 2005, that the first edition of Krystyna Piotrowska's aforementioned exhibition Próżna Street took place—perhaps the only serious recent exhibition concerning the Holocaust. The next, its third and final edition, will take place in September. On the one hand, we can observe a particular opening; on the other, regrettably, we still hear bizarre voices and assorted insinuations in public life. At the beginning of 2006, I showed Swimming Pool at the Jewish Center in Oświęcim. The exhibition coincided with the controversy surrounding a bizarre ‘idea’ proposed by Marcin Libicki, a Law and Justice MEP from Poznań. He suggested buying the Poznań synagogue from the Jewish community and… demolishing it, thereby ‘finally solving’, as Iza Kowalczyk aptly put it, the problem of Poznań's ‘swimming pool’. It had seemed that the era of demolishing synagogues was behind us. Apparently not entirely. Libicki's proposal was terrifying, disgraceful and embarrassing. It is worth recalling that earlier, in March 2001, the same Marcin Libicki had given a personal guarantee for Henryk Mania, accused and convicted of participating in genocidal crimes against the Jewish population at Chełmno nad Nerem; and in 2005 he had reported the website of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance to the public prosecutor (the investigation was, of course, discontinued). This illustrates a certain context. Interestingly, Libicki is an art historian by training. It is difficult to believe that the ‘idea’ of demolishing a synagogue could have been put forward by someone with even a passing familiarity with art history. The vile rhetoric Libicki used in his article contradicts the elementary sensitivity expected not so much of an art historian as simply an educated person. The proposal was formulated by a representative of Law and Justice, and therefore of the party in power. There can be no social consent for statements of this kind. They are simply unacceptable. Anyone who speaks this way discredits himself as a politician. One might think it would end his public activity. Yet Libicki continues to appear here and there, speaking as someone supposedly competent in cultural matters, among others [laughter]. This is probably possible only in Poland, where different, special standards continue to apply, where a monument to Dmowski is erected… Recently, however, I heard that the issue of Poznań's swimming pool is finally to reach a positive conclusion.

J.K.: Is there any continuity between the subjects intertwined in your work?

R.J.: I think so. All these works, sometimes apparently very remote from one another, are probably connected by a particular way of thinking. Well, I am their author after all [laughter].

J.K.: How important is the exhibition context to your work?

R.J.: Fundamental. I always try to enter into dialogue with the context of the exhibition in which I participate. Context also matters in group exhibitions. A work's message can change; it can be read differently depending on the problem posed by the curator. This is most visible in the case of Arbeitsdisziplin, a work that has travelled widely.

J.K.: I wanted to ask about your connections with Foksal Gallery. Is that model of art close to you? Does your art grow from those roots? Your exhibitions referred to the history of the place.

R.J.: It is difficult to say that my art grows from the roots of Foksal Gallery without lapsing into unnecessary pathos. The history of Foksal Gallery, which recently celebrated its fortieth anniversary, is so rich that it is unclear what those roots are. Many different artists exhibited there, and all contributed to the history of the place. Perhaps someone else should assess it—someone with the necessary distance and therefore able to be more objective. Would it not be a pretentious usurpation to say that I create in the spirit of Kantor or Stażewski, for example? I do what I do. Generally it has nothing to do with Foksal Gallery, unless I happen to be working on an exhibition for the gallery. I do not think that my next work must grow from Foksal's roots. I simply work at my own pace, and that is all. I learnt the history of Foksal Gallery as the history of a place important to Tadeusz Kantor, in whom I was interested. The first exhibition I saw at Foksal, however, was Mirosław Bałka's sza. I remember it was Ash Wednesday, 17 February 1999. Dirty snow was melting, and there was a display of fire outside the entrance. Inside was a chain made from newspaper obituaries. It was probably one of the finest exhibitions I have ever seen. Quiet, yet full of meaning. It made an almost shattering impression on me. The distance from Poznań to Warsaw nevertheless proves a barrier, a significant obstacle [laughter]. I remember seeing Edward Krasiński, whose art also interested me at the time, at the opening of sza. Earlier, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, I had met Jaromir Jedliński, who honoured me with his friendship. He taught classes and I was then a student. Jedliński's classes were lessons in thinking seriously about art. They showed what it means to take responsibility for one's choices. They had an enormous impact on my interests. Contact with Jaromir differed from most formulaic relationships within the academy—I felt he genuinely cared about the texts I brought to class, that it was not merely a necessary institutional formality. One sensed that something more was at stake—art. That was when I began writing. Later, through Jaromir, I met Wiesław Borowski, who at one point offered me an exhibition. Thus Foksal Gallery became an important place for me too. Naturally, I know the gallery's history only from historical accounts, stories and testimony. Reading the book Tadeusz Kantor: From the Foksal Gallery Archive was important. I held two exhibitions at Foksal: Form in 2004 and Mittel Weiß in 2005. Form entered into dialogue with Stażewski's painting, geometry and Constructivism. It consisted of paintings referring to medicine boxes: repainted geometric divisions stripped of their names. Various groups of drugs were invoked—painkillers, antipyretics, antidepressants, cold remedies, antibiotics, heart medication, sleeping tablets, diabetes medication and vitamins. In the corridor, a film showed two effervescent calcium tablets dissolving in a glass of water. Every viewer received a box of calcium pantothenate. Form was an exhibition about the pharmaceutical industry's impact on our lives, about the particular compulsion to ‘be in shape’, as the colloquial phrase has it. Thus it also had a corporate aspect, although perhaps more subtle and camouflaged than in Arbeitsdisziplin [laughter]. Constructivism rejected weakness. Form, by contrast, although colourful, concerned the fragility of the body. The exhibition Mittel Weiß, in turn, was an exhibition interior wallpapered with white woodchip paper actually called ‘Mittel Weiß’. The gallery was thereby transformed—as I remember you once wrote—from a white cube into a Mittel Weiß Cube [laughter]. The exhibition concerned the conventionality of conceptual narrative. One context might be the art of Andrzej Szewczyk, whom I was fortunate to meet shortly before his death. I think of his painting with decorators' rollers (‘the painting of the picture unified with the painting of the wall’). Edward Krasiński's blue Scotch tape, also attached to walls, is important too. And of course the theoretical manifestos formulated in the Foksal Gallery milieu. If I had to describe the experience of working with Foksal in one word, it would be: concentration.

J.K.: Your art is critical in a political, anti-corporate and historical sense. Do you assume it will have a measurable impact on the viewer, a real social effect?

R.J.: Yes. I have to believe in art's social impact, although that belief may be somewhat naïve, as I sometimes realise. But without it there would be no point engaging with art at all. Although art appears powerless, it possesses power in the symbolic order. And it can use that power.