I Want to Find a Small Crack That Brings a Momentary Twist, Creates Confusion and Sometimes Amazes

Tomasz Załuski: What does your process of developing projects look like? Are there any relatively constant factors that you consider when deciding on the shape and character of a new work? Could the local context of the place where a particular work is to be presented be regarded as one such factor?

Elżbieta Jabłońska: For me, work on a project is the outcome of several specific pieces of information. First and foremost, what most immediately surrounds me—by which I mean my actual situation in life—and then my intellectual and creative capacities. The remaining information includes the place, time, proposed space and technical conditions, as well as the local context and a range of additional information or intuitions. I think the works I make have always been within me; I ‘carry’ them until a situation arises that allows them to take on a real form.

TZ: Where did you begin when creating your project for Atlas Sztuki?
EJ: Above all with the unlimited possibilities, with ‘reconnaissance of the terrain’, including my intuitions about the local atmosphere—that is, the atmosphere of Łódź—with my current life experiences, and with observations and reflections on art.
TZ: More specifically? Which experiences, observations and reflections were decisive for the work’s final shape? To what extent, for example, did you take into account the customary reality of art-exhibition openings?
EJ: The work made for the exhibition at Atlas Sztuki in Łódź is divided into two fundamental parts that complement one another naturally. What I proposed to the public follows logically from the gallery space, which consists of two rooms, and from a division that interests me, arising from the gallery building’s location within the tightly enclosed space of a courtyard. At present, this sense of ‘enclosure’ is intensified by the fact that the enormous windows running around the entire building are covered. The duality in question—the building in a courtyard surrounded by tenement houses constructed in a completely different style; a gallery building surrounded by residential buildings; or, finally, art’s enclosure within a gallery in general—became the project’s essential point of reference. As for opening nights, observing them prompted the so-called ‘table activities’, the series The Way to the Heart Is through the Stomach. The day an exhibition opens is a distinctive kind of celebration, and this celebration is my inspiration.
TZ: What draws particular attention in your project for Atlas Sztuki is the arrangement, in a specific individual place and time, of a complex spatial and conceptual game between ‘openness’ and ‘closure’, between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. By using the gallery building’s particular location, you brought into being several related, nested spaces in which the boundaries between the openness of the exterior and the closure of the interior become dynamic, ambiguous and dependent upon the viewer’s position and ‘categorising decision’. Where does this interest in the ambiguous character of space come from? What significance does this issue have for you? To what extent might it be related to the institutional mode of art’s existence?
EJ: When working on a project, I pay attention to many, often disparate details, which is why ‘reconnoitring the terrain’ and finding the information from which a particular story emerges are so important to me. It was similar with the work you are asking about. The ‘ambiguous character of space’ appears very clearly at Atlas Sztuki. I mean specifically the gallery’s architecture, its location and the division of its interior. In a more general sense, however, I am concerned with the gallery as an institution and with art’s functioning within precisely such an institutionalised space.

TZ: How would you define your present work in relation to earlier projects? Which previous threads does it continue, and what do you feel constitutes a new element?
EJ: I have the impression that I continue many threads in this work; multiplicity itself is also a continuing element—most of my earlier works had precisely this aspect. In 2003, continuing the series The Way to the Heart Is through the Stomach, I made a work entitled Kitchen. In its essential conception, it continued the ‘table activities’, which I reinforced by adding four classic kitchen cabinets displayed throughout the exhibition. An additional element was their enlargement to a decidedly inconvenient size. When this work was presented at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, a social thread also appeared: the situation of Polish women working illegally in Berlin. The project prepared for Atlas Sztuki is similar. The enormous furniture-shaped construction created for the present exhibition is an absurdly expanded element of Kitchen; the countless doors refer distantly to Domestic Games; while the dozens of waiters looking after the well-being of visitors to the opening refer to the action The Way to the Heart Is through the Stomach. The new elements are the scale, spatiality, particular openness, and an element of discomfort, threat and instability that also appears here.

TZ: The work now on display is thoroughly authorial: you decided upon the subject, the principal motif and the exhibition title, and also determined—or at least approved—every detail of its production. I would like to ask, however, what you think of typical curatorial projects in which artists are given a predetermined task and a particular, usually thematic, framework for action. From your perspective, how does this kind of response to a set theme differ from an artist’s own project?

EJ: I associate the curatorial projects you mention quite unambiguously with group exhibitions, and therefore with presentations of several or a dozen entirely different artistic personalities. It is a specific situation, often very difficult and complicated. Attempts to give such an exhibition a common theme or title seem entirely natural to me. When I participate in thematic exhibitions, my way of thinking about a project changes very little. I pay attention to the same kind of information. I mean the place, time, space and a great mass of additional information, and above all my present condition—let us call it my state of mind—as well as my own intellectual and creative capacities. Among all this information, one item is the ‘set theme’, meaning the title and curatorial commentary.

TZ: Do you prefer artist-led or curatorial projects?
EJ: The division into artist-led and curatorial projects is probably not a particularly accurate distinction. By participating in a ‘thematic’, and therefore group, exhibition, I do not deprive my work of the character of an authorial statement. The difference lies rather in the way works are displayed: they naturally enter into a kind of dialogue with one another and often acquire new meanings. Sometimes a curator invites an artist to a ‘thematic’ exhibition with a specific pre-existing work, because precisely that work has a significant influence on the exhibition’s overall shape. At other times, when invited to participate in an exhibition with a particular title, I can create a new work, but my earlier projects are still taken into account. I am therefore not anonymous, and something more or less clearly defined can probably be ‘expected’ of me.
TZ: So you would not agree that curatorial projects are a contemporary form of ‘ideological patronage’? To what extent can one speak of curators’ co-creative role in relation to artworks presented within their projects?
EJ: I find that statement wholly unacceptable. There may be artists who, when producing their works, draw heavily on general tendencies prevailing in art and try to make ‘fashionable’ work. Something resembling ‘ideological patronage’ may then appear, but that is an entirely different situation, one I regard negatively. When a curator invites particular artists to collaborate, they generally already have a very definite vision of the exhibition. I therefore read curatorial projects rather as authorial projects addressing a specific issue… I find the co-creation you ask about in the mysterious connections that appear between individual works and are legible only to very perceptive and persistent viewers. Under no circumstances can one speak here of co-creation in relation to the ‘work’.

TZ: Your artistic practice seems characterised by a strong sensitivity to social issues. Do you think art education helped such a tendency to crystallise or develop within you—or at least did not obstruct it?
EJ: My art education proceeded in a fairly classical way: five years of study at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. What I remember most from that period are meetings with friends, long shared festivities interspersed with conversations about art. So I do not think education significantly influenced my ‘social sensitivity’, as you put it; I am not sure whether any influence in this sphere is possible at all. I think it simply arises from personality, upbringing and a particular affection for people and the world.

TZ: Could such ‘social sensitivity’ in artistic activity be taught at ‘academies of fine arts’ at all?
EJ: Definitely not.
TZ: In recent years, many of your actions have been organised around the figure of helping others, particularly those with social problems. Yet you stipulate that in your socially oriented activity you are not a ‘social activist’ but remain an artist…

EJ: ‘The figure of helping’!? Well, that is something! No one has called it that before. Helping is simply helping. Now is the time for helping, which also offers many possibilities in the field of art. But I do not want to restrict either the field of my activities or the problems I address. What is more, it is not true that the helping actions concern only those with social problems. The ‘helping programme’ covers many more communities. During last year’s Prague Biennale, I carried out an action helping artists participating in the exhibition. I gave them an opportunity to use professional assistance during the final three days of installation. The situation is perfectly clear and comprehensible to anyone who has participated in large group exhibitions. While installing an exhibition involving more than one hundred artists, a characteristic kind of breakdown occurs precisely two or three days before the opening, when basic tools, materials, assistants and, above all, time begin to run out. Another project in the Helping series was the action Help Yourself , carried out in July 2003 at a gallery in Ustka. There I offered a kind of ‘help’ to a small group of people connected with art—curators, critics and artists. I organised a stay of several days for them in a seaside town in the middle of the holiday season so that they could regain their strength and divert their attention from areas connected with art. I provided accommodation, a communal meal, walks and appropriate reading. Naturally, my actions also included helping unemployed and homeless men in Kraków, for whom I organised origami workshops. Over two days the men made paper tulips, which they gave to women they met on International Women’s Day. Nevertheless, for one reason or another most of these works remain within the field of art, and their reach is considerably restricted; it is difficult in such cases to speak of any pure form of social work. Besides, I am not interested in that form of activity.
TZ: I admit that describing helping with the word ‘figure’ may not be particularly fortunate. The fact that the phrase suggested itself probably arises from my conviction that when an activity taken from ‘ordinary life’ is transferred into an artistic context, it loses its ordinary identity and ceases to be ‘simply’ what it is, or appears to be, in everyday life. In the same way, helping in art, through art or as art arguably ceases to be ordinary, ‘simple’ helping. The change undergone by an ordinary, everyday activity when it becomes art may be ‘positive’ or ‘negative’—everything depends on one’s point of view. Let us take your own experience: the starting point for your excellent 2003 action Helping was an advertisement posted on a drainpipe by a woman seeking work. You tried to find her and, when this proved impossible, found another woman in a similar financial situation. You gave her a job embroidering the advertisement’s wording in silver thread on white fabric for 500 złoty (the amount of your artist’s fee). I know that you did not meet the woman and did not attend the exhibition opening because, as you said, you did not want to ‘push some cause of your own’ on that occasion. Later, however, the outcome of the action was shown at Zachęta in the competition exhibition Views, which you won. This may lead to the conclusion that the action nevertheless helped support your own ‘cause’ and ‘promote’ your own artistic activity (although it should be remembered that you then used the prize money to pay the homeless men who folded the paper tulips). Is it not the case that—whether one wishes it or not—whenever even the most ordinary, everyday activity is performed in the context of art, certain artistic ‘causes’ are always being ‘pushed’? And sometimes they are pushed so forcefully that the activity’s normal, everyday effectiveness is restricted or eliminated?
EJ: You are of course right in claiming that every gesture, action and activity acquires a different character when ‘introduced’ into an artistic context. I hope, however, that something interesting then happens on the other side as well—the side of art. By choosing an ordinary, everyday situation and transferring it into an entirely different, alien field, on the one hand we emphasise its essence and, on the other, give that field a different character or expand the way in which it is understood and perceived.
TZ: Can one speak of any ‘effectiveness’ of art in helping people? What would it consist in?
EJ: Effectiveness in the context of art is indefinable; in any case, the very attempt to define it is probably unnecessary.
TZ: Do you think that ‘something of art’ can sometimes happen on the side of ‘proper’, ‘pure’ social activity?
EJ: I do not know and find it difficult to assess, and above all I am again unsure whether such an assessment is necessary. Art now touches upon so many problems—one of them may be helping, understood as a kind of social activity. For me, indicating a problem and creating a situation, a potential possibility, are more important than the final result of these actions.
TZ: Your works—perhaps particularly Supermother—are sometimes interpreted in the context of feminist thought and practice. What do you think of that interpretation? Does this context play a leading role in the way you yourself conceive and read your works? Or instead of ‘feminism’ or ‘postfeminism’, do you prefer the broader notion of ‘women’s art’?
EJ: I would most like to answer this question in Ilya Kabakov’s words: every interpretation is a good one. I must add, however, that a feminist or postfeminist context plays no role either in the way I conceive my works or in the way I later read them. I find it difficult to accept the situation of assigning works so unambiguously to very specific currents at all.

TZ: But if someone nevertheless tried to isolate those elements of your practice that could be described as (post-)feminist, would you agree that they consist in an exaggerated, ostentatious identification with particular social roles—above all those performed by women—and that this excessive identification takes a given role to the point of absurd caricature, thereby exposing its character in an amusing and ironic manner while simultaneously ensuring a reflective and critical distance from it?

EJ: I will answer briefly: I would accept that interpretation.
TZ: Looking at what you do from another perspective, one could probably say that you are very interested in everyday life as a ‘subject’ or ‘field of action’ for art. Why? What can art bring by engaging with the everyday in different ways and persistently turning towards the ordinary? Can it change the generally negative everyday connotations of daily life—unceasing bustle, effort, rushing around, boredom, mechanical repetition, commonness, banality, painfully acute ‘ordinariness’, and so forth? Can it affirm the value of everyday life? Make it ‘extraordinary’? Or rather encourage the—probably difficult—affirmation of all the aspects just mentioned? Or, on the other hand, might it be a matter of striving—by definition probably impossible and utopian—to dissolve art into everyday life?
EJ: It is true that many of my works to date have been drawn from everyday reality, the reality closest to and surrounding me. Directing attention towards ordinary, common, boring and often tiring areas is intended both to ‘affirm their value’ and to affirm all these ‘uninteresting’ aspects of everyday life. Showing a certain ordinary situation, banal activity or common inclination produces a moment of the reflection that interests me—even if it is only a brief flash, a sudden illumination. Everyday life is apparently predictable, yet exceptional phenomena are situated at its opposite pole. What we call the everyday undeniably consists of both these poles, and I hope that my works touch these two extreme situations at least to some degree. An enormous kitchen placed in the gallery so that I can perform at it the mechanical, repetitive and universally familiar gestures of chopping, cutting, mixing, spreading, peeling, serving, pouring, wiping, cooking and washing up… is nevertheless much larger than normal, indeed enormous and overwhelming. My behaviour is predictable, but the furniture’s dimensions are entirely surprising and exceptional, so that my work at it also takes on a different meaning. Affirming and recognising the value of the everyday are important elements in my work, but I am also interested in introducing unexpected chaos and confusion into an existing order. One such work is Flipper from 2002, a game of skill. The interior of a pinball machine was transformed into a small flat and furnished with miniature household objects, creating a game governed by entirely different rules. The incoming ball caused sudden confusion, chaos and irreversible destruction. I was guided by a similar principle in Violation, made for the Łódź Biennale. There, chaos was only a disturbance of the existing order, but a highly significant one because it took place in the Museum of the History of the City—a place intended for ordering, cataloguing and storing… In addition to affirming and recognising the value of everything banal, repetitive and painfully ordinary, I also want to find a small crack that brings a momentary twist, creates confusion and sometimes amazes.

TZ: In one interview, you said that ‘life itself can be art’. How should this be understood?
EJ: The statement concerns an individual situation that cannot be translated into the language or field of art in a disclosed sense. I was thinking of ‘a good life’. That is my ideal and what I strive for. To live a day well—is that not an art?