In Conversation with Cezary Tkaczyk

Krzysztof Cichoń: Why do you photograph?

Cezary Tkaczyk: I received my first camera from my godfather for my First Communion. It was a Soviet Zorki, and I did not take a single picture with it! I mean, I did take a picture in the sense of performing an action I would call “click”, although the sound it made was probably more of a “clink”. I even tried to develop the film myself, but as might have been expected, my first “work” flowed down the fast current into the Vistula. What I liked best about the camera was the smell of its leather case and the yellow spot in the rangefinder, which made the world look very optimistic. It was an export product, made in the USSR. My uncle was probably delighted with the present he had given me, while I had very little idea what to do with it.

Seriously, though, it is a very simple and difficult question. I think I use photography because I am a perfectionist, but I also photograph because, at a certain point, it was a good way to earn the money necessary to live. On a personal level, it was probably an escape from the closed world in which I remained while painting, drawing or simply thinking. An escape caused by a kind of claustrophobia I developed after spending ten years in stuffy art studios. Everything became either terribly serious or terribly exhausting. Photography is a form of liberation. I can concentrate on it and conduct my search alone, yet at the same time I am surrounded by other people, without whom nothing could be created. That makes sense to me. It is a creative process that takes place largely outside the creator: a process based on one’s own choice and on accepting or rejecting what other people propose. This is what keeps photography alive for me.

There is also the element of technique and technological possibility. In this respect, photography continues to develop, unlike painting or printmaking. And that stimulates the imagination.

K.C.: Why did you begin experimenting with this spatial technique? Did flat photography cease to be enough?

C.T.: I knew a question like that would come up in an interview. I just did not expect it to arrive complete with the answer. Yes, flat photography stopped satisfying me.

K.C.: How long does it take to make a spatial nude of this kind, and what are the stages of the process?

C.T.: I will begin with the second part. Finding funds or people who have them — ideally people who see purpose and value in the undertaking. Assembling the right team, guided by intuition and whatever life brings. Then it is simply a matter of making the photograph, producing the spatial map, separating the layers, exposing them onto photosensitive material, mounting everything in Plexiglas and aluminium, and arranging the proper lighting and installation in the gallery. You cannot put it in a drawer. As for time, everything depends on the above. Naturally, it costs me many hours before the computer and in photographic sessions where the image is created. Without support, however, producing the exhibits would take considerably longer than “a Russian year”. The most important phase for me is the one in which the image first forms in my imagination and then once again as a physical volume. When creating the image on the computer, I do not see it in three dimensions. The imagined volume accompanies me until the physical object exists. Then I look. At that moment I am aware that no one perceives it as I do, and I care very little whether people will “buy” it.

K.C.: Do you regard this kind of photography more as a new medium — a technological discovery — or as something that significantly changes an artistic statement?

C.T.: Thanks to the possibilities offered by new photographic materials and the computer, this kind of photography definitely has the scent of technological novelty. Does it change the artistic statement? Certainly to some extent, but I must wait until the opening before answering how. A life-size human being presented in this way carries weight, physically as well. I myself will see something like this for the first time, and all I can say is that I am curious. Every technique carries a particular temperament, emotion or idea, and this one also communicates something. Some choose watercolours, others car wrecks or human organs. I chose photography and subjected it to a slight modification. The form I adopted is not merely a picture in Plexiglas surrounded by an aluminium frame, a technical novelty that seduces through charm. It is a human being enclosed within a cold, raw volume and placed on public display. A naked, ordinary person who does not “offend” through nakedness at all.

K.C.: What are the limitations of your technique? Presumably Matejko’s Battle of Grunwald could not be divided into layers?

C.T.: On the contrary, it could. It probably would not make sense, unless the point were to establish a market presence. The technique has several limitations, but I do not think I want to discuss them in this interview. If you were a creative director at an advertising agency, I would explain everything in detail. But when we are speaking about the works in the exhibition, all the “flaws”, or what you call “limitations”, are marvellously appropriate. Human beings are not perfect, after all, and their imperfections often increase their value if they can accept them. The shortcomings of this technique may produce certain deformations. In this case I am trying to conceal them, but I do not know whether I might want to exploit them in the future.

K.C.: Are you not slightly afraid that the streets will soon fill with three-dimensional, Tkaczyk-style advertisements for chocolate bars and tampons that “exceed our expectations” as consumers?

C.T.: No, of course I am not. That is simply the reality we inhabit. Urinals, hamburgers, cola and inflatable rabbits have already entered galleries. Why should gallery exhibits not become commonplace? To me, that too has an artistic dimension — I did not manage to avoid the word “artistic”… I do not entirely know what it means. It is also part of the process. Tampons? Not a bad idea. XXL. You would almost want to use one. But let us pause at the question. Should any “photographer-creator” be “afraid” that their pictures will be ridiculed because photographic posters advertising supermarket delicatessen products hang around the city? Or should a “painter-creator” worry that someone has painted an advertisement in oils? Today one must recognise that anything and anyone can be turned into a promotion. Perhaps the fact that this technique is so well suited to advertising means that a naked person enclosed in a cold volume simply becomes a product with human features and anatomy. The viewer or critic will make the classification anyway. I do not know — perhaps the volumes should contain the personal details of those portrayed together with some promotional copy?

K.C.: The painstaking labour, time and monumentality of this technique appear to predestine it for “grand subjects” far removed from the transient and changing, from the snapshot — everything to which photography has accustomed us. Could it be more sculptural than photographic?

C.T.: I do not want to construct a theory around something still in the process of being created. Once it exists, I will not want to do so either. I must admit that I have thought about this and still do not know what kind of subject — “grand” or “small” — will be appropriate. What I make will indeed be monumental in its own way, remote from transience and the snapshot, and the form definitely emphasises that. Whether a person, or a group of naked people, is a “grand subject” remains to be seen, because form has considerable importance here. Perhaps a “small” subject will become “grand”?

K.C.: Was your decision to use the nude as the subject of the pair shown at Atlas Sztuki motivated by a desire to find a theme whose “weight” matched the properties of your technique?

C.T.: The nude is ideal. Unclouded purity. I never dreamed it would come together this way. Something fantastic happened while I was searching for funding to produce the exhibition. I came to Atlas Sztuki and thought there was a small chance of making a show. I knew how difficult it was to find money in Poland to realise an idea, especially as sponsors generally expect substantial benefits from this kind of undertaking. And then, suddenly, this surprise. One might say we found one another through a shared subject.

K.C.: What is the actual subject of your work? A Naked Family? The Holy Family? The arrangement of the nudes suggests an altarpiece retable.

C.T.: The subject is rather an “ordinary family”. An ordinary family that in reality is not a family at all. It is only a pattern: mother, father, daughter and son. Is that not the ideal arrangement, even though the models themselves are by no means ideal? They are people like many of us, the most difficult to notice in the street because they are neither beautiful nor ugly. It is not that I am doing them a favour by finally making someone notice them. It might look a little like that, although if they undressed on Piotrkowska Street they would probably be noticed without any creator’s assistance. The point is that in this form they will no longer be themselves at all. They will be inaccessible and symbolic, almost like figures from an altar. The only question is whether they will be received or expelled from “paradise”. The expelled generally conceal their nakedness.

K.C.: How did you choose the models? On the one hand they differ from the commercialised, processed image of the human commodity that dominates today’s iconosphere; on the other, they look considerably better than the extremes so readily used by Critical Art. Did you want your selection to fall between these two poles, both equally remote from normality?

C.T.: It never occurred to me to position myself between those extremes. I want to show them in the future. For now, the selection happened to fall in between. That is the premise of this exhibition. We were not searching for some imagined ideal of the ordinary person. For my part, I expected a particular combination among the people who appeared. And that is what happened; the choice was made. I am satisfied. People pair up in different ways, so our “family” is quite realistic.

K.C.: Are you not afraid that today, faced with images of humanity as bluntly penetrating as Gunther von Hagens’s anatomical specimens, showing nakedness that is neither distorted, deconstructed nor mocked might simply be regarded as a view too shallow, epidermal and uninteresting beside the mannerist representations of corporeality created for the culture of spectacle in which we live?

C.T.: Fear of any kind probably makes no sense. Some people will surely say precisely that: “shallow, epidermal, uninteresting…” Changing the concept for that reason would be pointless, especially since I am only at the beginning of my search. If one day my works become deformed, spectacular or bluntly penetrating, it will surely result from reflection and inquiry, not a simple need to be noticed. Von Hagens also exposes himself to attacks from many directions and on a massive scale. He likewise wins recognition and money on a massive scale. Thanks to his own method of preserving corpses, Von Hagens is at least unique, the first and only one. By making specimens for scientific reasons, he became an artist.

It seems to me that artists have already said so much about the human being that the search for new formal means is not accidental at all, and that people outside the Academy find them more readily. Von Hagens reached the heart of the problem. That is no reason, however, to abandon one’s own projects, even those drawn with an HB pencil, simply because someone has just shocked the world. I do not think we should suddenly drop everything and reach for a scalpel.