In Conversation with Jadwiga Sawicka

Krzysztof Cichoń: I read that you like Proust—not, if I remember correctly, for the madeleines, but because one can learn from him that art can give meaning to every life? 

Jadwiga Sawicka: Yes.
K.C.: So art would have a somewhat therapeutic function?

J.S.: A very therapeutic one. Any creative activity has a beneficial effect on the mind: horizons broaden and one’s mood improves. It is almost like playing sport… Naturally, the quality of the activity is an entirely different matter.
K.C.: And if you had to choose, what would be more important: quality or the beneficial effect? 

J.S.: There is no such choice, so I do not think I shall trouble my head over it. I would most readily choose excellent quality together with the beneficial effect. The absence of a choice within this offer is a very interesting element and adds tension to the matter.

K.C.: When does the moment arrive when a person realises that what they are doing is good, that they are an artist? After all, it does not happen on graduating from the Academy. In your case, was there a moment when you realised you had succeeded? That people were responding to what you made? Or had it always been that way…

J.S.: No. It had not always been that way. Besides, there are intermediate states—you can know that you have something to say but be unable to express it. Or express it and then fail to recognise it, and consequently fall into doubt. Or recognise it and become frightened that it looks like that. Look around and withdraw. Altogether, this takes a great deal of time and is very exciting; it is therefore easy not to notice the moment when certain things simply clarify themselves, because in return various other, equally absorbing problems arise. The fact that at a certain point what I was doing was noticed was a fortunate coincidence; it might just as easily not have happened. I do not know how I would have behaved then, and it is difficult to speculate: perhaps I would have become bitter and eccentric, or perhaps I would be a far nobler person. 

K.C.: You have a particular vantage point as someone who is also a teacher. Are these two worlds?

J.S.: They are more like separate worlds, and I believe that is beneficial for me. At good moments there is an element of play in it—becoming someone entirely different. I am not particularly concerned for these worlds to interpenetrate.
K.C.: Do you readily comment on your works, or should they reach the viewer by themselves? 

J.S.: I have no fixed strategy. I once regarded speaking about my works as torture, until I discovered—and it truly was a kind of illumination—that I do not have to tell the truth! I could lie quite brazenly—but that requires an imagination I do not think I possess. I prefer to deviate slightly from the truth, conceal some small part, embellish a little… I assume that it makes no difference to the viewer what I say, that the works are hermetic, say nothing, perhaps even repel. They will not reach the viewer by themselves unless the viewer shows goodwill. I rely on this goodwill and consequently accept almost every interpretation of my work (I say “almost every” because, although no interpretation to date has provoked my firm opposition, who knows…). I am happy to talk about things that can be recounted—for instance, where the words in a painting come from, whose garment it was, why that colour, and so forth. But my written commentaries and texts accompanying exhibitions are, to tell the truth, deliberate obfuscations and attempts to cover my tracks. So I both speak and do not speak, and when I speak, it may not be true. 

K.C.: Writing and words have been present in your works for some time. Will that remain the case, or is there still something that cannot be put into words?

J.S.: If one looks more closely, one can see that the paintings and photographs contain no inscriptions, so there is room for things that cannot and need not be put into words. It is a disconcerting question, because I do not know what declarations I am expected to make here. It is like asking a woman who happily dresses in blue: “Will you ever wear anything else? Is it going to stay like this—this blue?” On the other hand, if the woman has, say, worn nothing but blue for ten years… perhaps she should not feign surprise when someone draws such conclusions. I do not treat it as though I had already found my style and could not do anything else because no one would then recognise me. The awareness that what I do has such a limited reach is very refreshing: if I were a popular singer, I would feel more obliged towards my style.

K.C.: And have you found your style?
J.S.: I do not think of it that way. The appearance of inscriptions and words suits me at the moment, but I do not know whether it will in ten years’ time. From the outside, it may appear that I have defined myself very clearly and one can expect me to do something within certain delineated boundaries, but from within it looks entirely different, fortunately.
K.C.: Why this particular narrowing of the colour range in your works, especially those containing inscriptions? 

J.S.: Well, that is the limited range I have… it is no better in the other paintings—they are confined to a single colour and shades of black. But I would like to point out that the colour is carefully chosen and the shades of grey are differentiated! Unless they are letters, in which case, indeed, black and that is that. This combination or juxtaposition seems to offer the possibilities that interest me most (I stopped myself from saying: an infinite number of possibilities). At least for now. Or, put differently, only this possibility exists (at least for now); I have no choice—in order to achieve a result that satisfies me, I have to use these particular means. Even if they may seem monotonous and undifferentiated (to someone else, because not to me).
K.C.: Do you become nervous when you read texts about yourself? Are you more often pleased, or are they more often wide of the mark?
J.S.: Some texts about my works (because I would nevertheless distinguish the two) are genuinely interesting to me! I am always surprised that so much—that anything at all—can be written about them. I do not consider myself to possess the sole correct interpretation of my works, so I do not look at these texts in terms of whether they are accurate or inaccurate. Even if something sometimes surprises me, it is an expression of someone’s opinion, and therefore says as much about the writer as about my work. Or someone may focus on an aspect that is unimportant to me. So I do not take it so personally. It is like someone commenting on my appearance. I may feel hurt or pleased, but I do not take it to heart as a person and I do not change, because in truth there is little I can change here. 

K.C.: Speaking of clothes, I recently saw paintings by Jarosław Modzelewski depicting clothes against a smooth ground. What is happening—is Polish garment art on the offensive? What are the clothes, the empty clothes, doing in your works?
J.S.: There are also people who paint televisions, sports equipment, toys, animals and representatives of different professions… Should they therefore be divided into suitable groups and asked: “What is happening, etc.?” It seems not only rash but rather superficial to me, though I am not an art historian. Clothes stand in for people. They are what is accessible from the outside, something intermediate between the person wearing them and another person who looks at them. They are a kind of resultant between what one is and what one wants to be. I like the fact that they contain something conscious and unconscious, that they are a compromise. I like the fact that some of the form results from the person, because they are fat or tall, while some depends on fashion. In clothing there is a margin for what one wants to show and what reveals itself of its own accord—for example, through inept cutting, questionable taste or poor availability in the shops.
K.C.: You began by saying that clothing is a kind of packaging or outer skin. It seems to me that what you make—empty clothes, and also the words painted in your pictures—is perhaps a kind of contemporary allegory. That is, something that packages and refers to something else, to some interior or content. Am I mistaken?
J.S.: I think one can say that. I made packages, for example: I wrapped boxes in wrapping paper or covered books. A book is already full of content, important or unimportant. What I liked was that I was making use of this content, that this was a rather dismissive way of treating the books and that their contents were being made uniform.

K.C.: It is slowly dawning on me that the word “packaging”—packaging as an allegory referring to content—may be what best conveys what you do. Quite by chance, Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia opened for me at the description of the allegory of Pleasure—a winged youth with curly hair wearing boots with golden uppers. Ripa describes these golden uppers almost as precisely as you paint around the shoes in your pictures. In the seventeenth century, in addition to form, allegories still contained some explicable content. Later they supposedly died out. But today, in your works, all these ownerless clothes, empty inside, and boxes packaging nothing—are they not allegories somewhat fractured by contemporaneity? Emotional allegories, because emotion is something important in your practice?

J.S.: It is important to me. I think it may or may not be visible, but it matters to me.
K.C.: But at the moment when you begin a work…
J.S.: Yes, then it does—above all. Naturally, I can begin with emotion, but because I am a visual artist, although I think in feelings, it is obvious that I shall express it in one way rather than another.

K.C.: “Visual” is a little too modest; your works also contain smell, taste and sound. 

J.S.: Sound really is an addition, and smell too.
K.C.: Then what is not an addition? What would you not relinquish in this exhibition? I do not believe it can be divided so neatly into important things and additions…

J.S.: Everything is important, because I wanted to do it this way. The idea arose simultaneously to combine the words LOST INNOCENCE with some sensory, tangible element—for example, chocolate and fragrance. Both perfume and chocolate are things that give the body pleasure. And there is a boundary very easily crossed, beyond which something highly pleasurable becomes unpleasant because there is too much of it, it is too strong or it begins to cause harm. I liked the fact that something fundamentally good becomes a problem. At a reasonable level of use, one should have no problem with it, but such reason is difficult to achieve, and one can fall into trouble that—viewed soberly—is entirely unnecessary, yet no less serious for that tormented individual.

K.C.: Taste has already appeared in your works; a distinctive fragrance floats over the Atlas Sztuki exhibition. What is this coupling of the senses meant to achieve—intensification?
J.S.: The taste [of chocolate—at the exhibition “Beauty, or Painterly Effects” in Bielsko-Biała, the words LOST INNOCENCE were smeared with chocolate—K.C.] and the fragrance (of roses) accompanying personal and social advertisements are a kind of excess, a surplus—it is like ending a sentence with four exclamation marks, or writing in capital letters and also underlining, or, during an argument, smashing plates in addition to raising one’s voice. It changes nothing in the content of the message; it is essentially unnecessary and may offer an additional reason for offence. One usually regrets such things afterwards. I am drawn to this literalness accompanying a deliberately incomprehensible message because it has been torn from context.

K.C.: Let us speak a little more about chocolate. I have just read that it has been a typical material of feminist art since the 1970s (Charlotte Moorman apparently smeared herself with it), and I would like to know at what point the decision is made that it will be chocolate rather than, say, jam or honey.
J.S.: The decision as to why I smeared the words LOST INNOCENCE with chocolate rather than jam can be explained aesthetically (I very much like the colour brown and shall therefore use it, or I dislike the colour brown and shall therefore use it), in terms of taste and health (I like it, therefore… I dislike it, therefore… good but unhealthy… good and delicious, soothing, cheering and addictive, therefore…), or ethically (chocolate is good, admittedly, but too much of a good thing is bad for you).

K.C.: Chocolate supposedly offers a direct path to something called Abject art, and onwards to Julia Kristeva, who wrote an essay (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 1982) about disgust and appetite being braided together, exactly as Helen Chadwick did with blonde hair and a pig’s intestine. In 1994, I believe, Chadwick held a London exhibition featuring chocolate and the intense fragrances rising from the floral-cosmetic photographs Wreaths to Pleasure in the leading role. Chadwick’s works are described as abstract allegories or libidinal allegories. So, reflecting on the scent of roses in the corner containing personal advertisements, I would like to return once again to the question of whether your works are allegories.

J.S.: I saw Helen Chadwick’s exhibition at the Barbican this summer. Some of her works are very close to me, others less so. But it was highly inspiring and reminded me anew that such a sensory and literal use and combination of different elements cannot be replaced by anything else. I do not mind that other women artists did it; indeed, it is an additional reason to do it (that is, specifically to use chocolate here). For a moment I am together with them, which does not mean that I shall now enthusiastically smear texts with different substances. I do not know whether my works are allegories—perhaps they are, but this particular aspect interests me little. I do not mean that it is untrue, but simply that I cannot be bothered to think about it.

K.C.: What is the fundamental building material of your works? Emotions, curiosity, perversity, the desire to comment, the search for form, the habit of a painterly gaze that records?
J.S.: What does “building material” mean? What matters most to me? But what then of the “habit of a painterly gaze”? Why “habit”? It does not sound very positive. Can one be creative from habit? “Perversity”, in turn, sounds rather coquettish. Perhaps I shall choose: the search for form in order to comment upon emotion.

K.C.: Let us return, then, to emotion. Was it not precisely because of emotion that you were placed in a box labelled “women’s art” or “feminist art”?
J.S.: In most cases, someone who is a visual artist is guided by an impulse—something appeals to me, it is stimulating… I genuinely do not think that speaking about emotions is something exceptional and highly distinct.

K.C.: But does it not help to close you inside such a box?
J.S.: I do not think I am placed in such a box, but if I really can be put there, it is probably an important element. It was an important moment for me—meeting women critics who named and separated the feminist element. I am not saying that I would inscribe myself there, because no one likes to be assigned to something. On the other hand, one usually likes hearing about oneself, and it may be useful. When someone calls me that, I begin to wonder whether it is true. Usually, when someone asks me directly whether this is feminist art, I begin to hedge, differentiate and say yes, but… Although openly saying that it is not feminist art does not suit me either.
K.C.: You have had quite a number of exhibitions recently. After how many did you feel it was meant to be different? Are you more often satisfied or dissatisfied? At the opening, do you already know whether it succeeded? Or perhaps you pay no attention to that?
J.S.: When producing things that require a great deal of work, the most important element is the tension involved in simply finishing on time and making it as it was meant to be. It is worse when they are paintings, because one really is more exposed… I dislike openings altogether. I congratulate myself once the opening is over.
K.C.: Why, ultimately, does one make exhibitions?
J.S.: In the case of things made specifically for an exhibition, they simply would not exist without it. Exhibitions make it possible to realise an idea. They make work possible.
K.C.: In your view, does a work become independent once it is completed, so that its subsequent fate and reception are not particularly important to the author, or does it continue to occupy a place in the creator’s mind for a long time?
J.S.: I think that depends on the author—that is, on his or her personality. I have no “view” on the matter; that would imply either extensive knowledge of how it is for every creative person, or a settled opinion about how it should be in every case. But as far as I personally am concerned, I do not really know how to answer either. I like the situation in which, after completing a work, one abandons it and moves on; that is essentially how it is when making text installations. First I find a text or inscription, and this is probably the most pleasant moment because it is the most carefree. Then they have to be prepared, which involves various problems that culminate at the moment of installation. So when the installation is finished, I abandon it with relief—besides, it will be destroyed anyway, and I generally leave immediately—and I am usually already thinking about the next work. Paintings are different. One spends longer with paintings; they remain at home and torment me if something in them is wrong, so they have to be repainted. Or even if a painting seems all right, I paint another version of the same motif because it continues to intrigue me.
K.C.: Is there a kind of art or an artist whom you sincerely cannot stand?
J.S.: Perhaps I shall say instead what I like: I decidedly prefer contemporary art to older art. I mean, naturally I look with pleasure at this or that (Vermeer or Chardin, for example), and it can be a profound aesthetic experience, but of a calm, passive, consumer kind. With contemporary art, the feelings—both positive and negative—are far more personal: I feel that I myself am involved in it and that it concerns me personally.
K.C.: This is very inelegant, but as an art historian I am continually wondering into which old-fashioned drawers to put you—somewhere between Realism and Expressionism…
J.S.: It is difficult to speak of Expressionism. I feel like an Expressionist inwardly, but it is clothed in such a vestigial form, so camouflaged… I do not know; I do not feel obliged to assist with this labelling.