Stach Szabłowski

“I think that an encounter with art can teach us a particularly great deal about ourselves,” Mariusz Libel of Twożywo tells Piotr Kosiewski. “One must remember, however, that a Bergman film watched by a secondary-school pupil is something different from the same film watched at the age of thirty-three by the same person, who has acquired a measure of life experience through many encounters, conversations and books. The film has not changed, but its perception is entirely different.”

The vision of the work of art as a mirror in which viewers see themselves reflected — their own face in the glass, yet a different face each time — seems obvious, even banal. Yet not everything is as it seems, and returning to something already interpreted once can prove genuinely surprising.

I am undergoing a revision of this kind in relation to the work of Twożywo, the duo formed by Mariusz Libel and Krzysztof Sidorek.

I have witnessed Twożywo’s activity for more than a decade, since the duo’s prehistory, when — still the Pinokio trio, together with Robert Czajka — they stencilled graphics onto Warsaw’s walls and pasted stickers in buses. My relationship with the phenomenon began as a viewer encountering traces of activity by anonymous graffiti artists concealed behind a pseudonym. I stood among the crowd of passers-by who saw Twożywo’s early classics: interventions that knocked perception off balance, such as Emanations of Weakness, The Antichrist Will Be an Artist and We Plunder the Ruins of Reality. These unsettlingly ambiguous, open-ended messages operated like fissures in the monolith of unequivocally persuasive communications filling public space.

Before my eyes, Twożywo changed from a countercultural “invisible hand” into an independent cultural institution — or perhaps an institution of public discourse. Twożywo placed its messages on tenement walls, billboards, posters and the Internet, and even — despite all the distrust of art institutions encoded within its underground genotype — in galleries. With time, I participated in this process not only as a passive viewer. I read about Twożywo, but also wrote about it, talked with the artists and collaborated on some of their projects.

No wonder, then, that I developed what seemed a fairly firm and well-grounded view of the meaning and nature of Twożywo’s activity. Yet I am now prepared to revise that view. I may of course have changed as a viewer and now see Twożywo with different eyes; the immediate impulse to rethink the duo, however, comes from its latest project, centred on the writings of Emil Cioran.

At this point we should recall how often and insistently Twożywo has emphasised its distance from art as a social institution. Where does this reluctance to identify with the “artistic” come from? Since we shall be speaking of Cioran, let us quote him through Mariusz Libel: “As art advances into a blind alley, the number of artists increases; art becomes simultaneously impossible and easy.” Resistance to playing the artist’s social role may naturally appear coy, especially given the duo’s prominent position within contemporary artistic hierarchies. Yet again, not everything proves to be as it seems. Twożywo’s resistance is fuelled by a genuine fear that all messages placed within the field of art are too readily accepted and neutralised — not to mention a justified mistrust of the art world’s hypocrisy-ridden morals. The members of Twożywo also had the moral right to assume the position of outsiders: they never attended art school, are self-taught and entered art’s orbit with an extensive independent system for distributing the results of their activity. The duo enters into tactical alliances with art institutions but does not depend on them; the system could collapse and Twożywo would remain capable of continuing its practice. Most importantly, its cautious distance from art institutions becomes a helping hand extended by Twożywo to viewers who set about interpreting its messages. It helps them avoid the misunderstandings bound to arise when we attempt to force Twożywo into the formats prevailing in contemporary art. These formats encouraged us to see the duo through the ritual subversiveness of critical art; pushed us to concentrate on artists’ “subversive strategies” for appropriating the languages of advertising and propaganda’s dominant discourses; and finally incited us to formal analyses, such as considering how much Twożywo owed to the Constructivist tradition and how much to the visual iconosphere of the Polish People’s Republic. Such reflections are interesting and by no means groundless. At the same time, however, they narrow the perspective and leave something important outside our field of vision.

This important “something” appears to be the essence of Twożywo’s latest undertaking, constructed around Emil Cioran’s writings. Here the work assumes the form of a book containing a rich collection of graphic compositions. Each takes a quotation from Cioran as its subject. Sometimes it is a single line, elsewhere an entire paragraph. Printed in white and red against black, the text assumes visual form: it is not merely written but shaped, formed and embodied. Here text can become a person broken in half, a smouldering cigarette, a hammer smashing the representation, a clock measuring the time of existence — and the time of reading. Twożywo mobilises a rich arsenal of tools drawn from visual poetry and typography, which has long served in the duo’s work as a method for gaining power over language. Alliterations and deconstructions bring out successive layers of meaning; the boundary between text and image disappears. We see what we read.

Twożywo’s methods are familiar to us, but the material of the project is extraordinary this time. What are these graphic compositions? Illustrations to Cioran? Acts of deconstructing his literature? An affirmation or critique of his thought? And what is Cioran’s text itself: protagonist, subject or material? Who is the author of this book — Twożywo, or still the Romanian thinker? I should like to see Twożywo’s project as a report on the process of reading. The artist becomes an attentive reader and presents that reading.

The figure of the artist immersed in a book is a rare image within an artistic landscape where reading chiefly serves to arm one’s theoretical arsenal. Beside the well-read Twożywo one might place Tomasz Kozak, whose work is a continual dialogue with literature: a practice of interpreting texts, writing palimpsests over them and adding footnotes. Yet these are not so much symptoms as exceptions proving the rule that the act of reading is absent from the visual arts.

Meanwhile, through Twożywo, Cioran offers us pronouncements such as these: “Man is an unhappy animal abandoned in this world, compelled to seek his own manner of living.” “The fact that I exist proves that the world has no meaning. Since the world permitted someone like me to come into being, it can only prove that the spots upon the so-called sun of life are so vast that in time they will extinguish its light entirely.” Or: “To remain calm before a landscape annihilated by light demands a fortitude I do not possess. The sun supplies me with black thoughts, while summer is the season in which I have always re-examined my relations with the world and with myself — always with a result thoroughly negative for both.” Beyond the absolute pessimism for which Cioran was known, even this handful of fragments introduces us into the realm of darkness — and, paradoxically, it becomes clear why the graphic works are printed on black pages. Twożywo’s work is naturally an interpretation of Cioran’s texts, a highly subjective and even personal reading, but not a polemic. The duo therefore follows the writer in his fundamental dispute with civilisation’s ordering of the world, but also with the very fact of existence. Why, however, does this particular writer become the guide for Twożywo, whose previous literary project, Herostratus, read Sartre — likewise an Existentialist, but one representing a radically different energy and political attitude? “Cioran stands outside every classification; he is neither poet nor philosopher, belongs to no guild, no guild cares for him, and he is absent from philosophy courses,” Libel tells Leszek Jażdżewski. Cioran’s resistance to classification fits well with the way the artists of Twożywo see themselves.

“We are not sticker artists, stencil artists, muralists, graphic artists or designers. Those are only tools and names of professions.” Who, then, are the members of Twożywo? The book on Cioran makes us pay close attention to the literary dimension of their work. They resemble poets who lament the disappearance of the capacity for metaphorical thought in a society organised by the dialectic of oversupply and impossible-to-satisfy demand. Behind the image of poets, in turn, emerge the faces of thinkers, philosophising through pictorial texts in public space. This is where my conception of Twożywo is revised. I agree with Piotr Kosiewski, who observes that Mariusz Libel — and, pars pro toto, Twożywo — is not the revolutionary some believed him to be, but a moralist. For years Twożywo conducted a guerrilla war against the System, introducing messages into circulation that ruptured, questioned or at least exposed the dominant narrative of consumer society, so aptly expressed in Libel and Sidorek’s malicious slogan “Have Fun and Work”. Yet inscribed within this critique of the system is another, deeper story: an existential narrative touching upon problems far more difficult to solve than the practical miseries of life in a neoliberal democracy. One of Twożywo’s most recent murals, painted on the blind wall of a building on Radzymińska Street in Warsaw, depicts two hybrid human-animal figures. The first, a small child with a sheep’s head, trustingly holds the hand of a suited man with a wolf’s head. This wolf in human clothing leads the sheep-person somewhere — forwards? into the future? to slaughter? — and nothing can be done about it. The mural is entitled człowieczy los, but the text is written in such a way that we can read the ominous hidden message los owiec. The mural has already attracted various interpretations. Some saw the wolf as the media leading a sheep-like society astray. Others thought of politicians and their wolfish eyes, which unmask public-relations smiles. One Warsaw politician even found a positive and heartening interpretation: the mural shows that, with a little mutual understanding, even a great wolf can become the guardian of a defenceless and lost little lamb.

But what if the dangerous bond between sheep and wolf is not a political situation, a threatening masquerade that can be unmasked? What if we assume that this is simply the human lot: the fate of sheep led by wolves, an image of an immutable rule that throws the weak to the strong as prey? One more step and Twożywo will enter into a philosophical alliance with Cioran, who leaves readers few illusions and not many — false — hopes, offering awareness in exchange, even if that awareness is accursed and pessimistic. Looking at Cioran’s texts arranged into images by Twożywo, I realised that this was always what moved me most in their work: moments of profound existential self-awareness operating beyond every political context and all immediate utility. Appropriating the language of advertising and propaganda in order to argue with power is one thing; appropriating them in the name of philosophising is far more.

In Twożywo’s mural Pięknopękłopiekło, “hell” and “beauty” share a letter o, while human silhouettes become the cracks. “Only a spirit full of cracks can look through them into other worlds,” Cioran says in the artists’ arrangement of the book they co-authored with him. As Libel puts it, Cioran can “provide a foundation for people who refuse materialist reduction. In a world of dying Christianity on one hand and fervently enlightened atheists on the other, some people accept neither position. They do not wish to give up thinking about meta-level questions.” In the book, this thinking occurs through reading: a process in which words receive their image, thoughts enter the mind in lexical form and the lexicon acquires a visible shape. Let us call it reading through images. As usual, Twożywo leaves thinking about the images to the viewers.

*Stach Szabłowski (b. 1973) is an art historian, exhibition curator, art critic and writer. A curator at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, he publishes in exhibition catalogues and art publications and contributes to numerous periodicals, including Przekrój, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, Obieg, K-Magazine and Architektura-Murator. He lives and works in Warsaw.