(Total running time: 62 min)
Pawel Althamer
Realtime Movie, 2007, 3:20 min
Pawel Althamer's trailer, Realtime Movie, was presented in 2007 in cinemas across London, on Tate's website, and on YouTube. It was shot and staged in London's Borough Market, featuring a cast of extras and the British actor Jude Law. The film depicts Law walking through the market and buying fish, and includes scripted, 'everyday' performances from the extras: a businessman talking on a mobile phone; a tourist looking at a map. The film has high production values—it looks like a 'real' trailer—but there is an odd collision between the slickness of the production and a wildly romantic, poetic voice-over, read by Law: "I was surrounded by a cloud of flames, but soon I realized that the fire burned within me … experiencing illumination beyond description." The trailer is a fiction for a nonexistent film. It serves as both an advertisement and a template for the viewer's subsequent experience of the live event.
Oskar Dawicki
Budget Story, 2007, 9:26 min
A film, the length of which is equal to the size of its production budget, starring well-known Polish actor Jan Nowicki.
Igor Krenz
Palace / Jackass Performance, 2006, 3:40 min
Jackass are yet another phenomenon of naive, contesting, amateur, folksy art. In fact, we can safely dub their practices "naive performance." Their often stupid and embarrassing actions lack an artistic nature or intention, but are always motivated with a huge dose of enthusiasm, a need for expression, for manifesting one's creative energy and spirit. Those are values worth the investment, irrespective of the context. It should be stressed that the whole tradition of avant-garde happening, performance, action art, intervention art, but also of "embarrassing art," "abject art" etc., finds its demise in the phenomenon of Jackass, is unconsciously alluded to and devalued (these days, it is increasingly difficult to perform a "de-conditioning," "awakening," perception-changing artistic action in a public or symbolic space). Therefore Jackass represents something of a problem for art. In our curatorial project we would like to analyze the space between art and Jackass, bringing the "naive performers" and established Polish artists pursuing performance-interventionist strategies together to collaborate.
Igor Krenz suggested a performance where Jackass would watch his movie The Palace for over eight hours, made specially for the occasion (eight hours of footage of Warsaw's social-realistic Palace of Culture and Science), a remake of Andy Warhol's famous Empire.
Igor Krenz
TV "S" [reconstruction], 2006, 3:30 min
In 1985 a group of astronomers from the Polish University of Torun constructed their own TV transmission equipment and superimposed Solidarity slogans over official TV broadcasts. Tests to check the range and effectiveness of the transmitter were carried out by broadcasting small geometric shapes in the corner of the TV screen. In September 1985, during an official news broadcast and during an edition of the popular detective series 07 Over and Out, the two following slogans appeared on the TV screen: "Solidarity Torun, Enough of price rises, lies and repression," and "Solidarity Torun, It is our duty to boycott the election."
Anna Niesterowicz
Your Kung Fu Very Low, 2008, 2:00 min
Anna Niesterowicz is interested in that which is "lost in translation" and cannot be explained, which belongs to the field of irrational associations, is "outside culture", is a result of irrational associations, is a result of error, misunderstanding, and especially that which affects and directly touches upon reality.
Tomasz Kozak
Song of Sublime, 2007, 11.30 min
Discussing his recent piece The Song of Sublime, artist Tomasz Kozak writes: "It seems that the present conventional meaning of sublimity has been determined in Poland by two discourses. On the one hand, the colloquial language, and on the other, the conceptions of Derrida and Lyotard, both developed on the basis of specific interpretations of Kant's argumentation. The two discourses have nothing in common, except the fact that their usage causes the reflection on sublimity to freeze in stereotypical formulas that explain nothing. The first of those—the formula of colloquiality—often identifies sublimity with pathos, construing it as an old-fashioned tendency towards exaltation, manifesting itself in a bombastic poetics of loftiness and grandiloquence. The second formula, the Derridian-Lyotardian discourse, focuses on the question of representation. In this context, the key points of reference are those parts of the Critique of Judgment where Kant considers the possibility of the sensual representation of 'extrasensory' ideas. According to Kant, 'the mind's efforts to make sensory notions adequate to ideas' are pointless—infinity and the absolute cannot be 'distinctly represented.' Derrida thinks along similar lines—according to him, infinity is 'inaccessible and inexpressible,' whole sublimity is the experience of 'inadequacy between the presenting and the presented in a presentation.' The inexpressibility of the infinite is also a key theme in the thought of Lyotard, who maintains that avant-gardism has 'its source in the Kantian aesthetics of the sublime'—it is thanks to it that 'even before Romantic art had been separated from the classic and Baroque means of representation, the door opened towards abstractionism and Minimal Art.' The avant-garde also headed in that direction, trying to 'present that there exists the unrepresentable,' and thus to attain art's true goal, which is to 'show that which makes things visible, rather than the visible itself.' This is how the sublime is trivialized and immobilized at the same time. Common-sensical colloquiality reduces it to old-fashioned exaltation, while postmodernism confines it to the abstract ghetto of the analytics of representation. The latter formula considerably expands the barren area where there are no resources anymore able to satisfy the burning needs of late modernity. Where modernity focuses solely on the mechanisms of seeing, it misses that which under no circumstances should be missed, namely the 'unruly' longings of the spirit of the time. In this situation—petrified by colloquiality and the postmodern—a third element emerges that starts to play a significantly important role. It is the element of commercial cinema. It turns the sense of sublimity into a 'projection' both psychological and cinematographic. The movie industry—producing images of sublimity on a mass scale—creates symbols of desires revolving around the phantasm of the disorder of the collective sense of Security, which in the liberal-democratic framework is defined by the postulate of the profitable taming of the Other—the uncontrollable and unprofitable. In this context, the question arises whether the Hollywood-generated images of uncontrollable natural elements and streams of energy penetrating the cosmic depths symbolize (self-)critical impulses of late modernity? Is an earthquake viewed on home cinema an analogy of the dialectic moment of the culture of Security—the moment where that culture, playing an aesthetical game with the image of disaster and adventure, revises its boundaries and tries to open itself to that which it perceives as dangerously Other, but also exciting and desired? These questions are accompanied by one more—the last but certainly not the least. Can the cinematograph be an instrument of a genuine revision and opening towards the Other, or is it but a pointless ersatz of change and a projector of false antitheses?
Oskar Dawicki
Tree of Knowledge, 2008, 5:00 min
Oskar Dawicki is known for ironic, critical, and subtly anarchistic actions, performances, and installations that approach identity issues in relation to the persona of the artist, institutional structures, and paradoxes of reality. Utilizing neo-Dadaist strategies, he highlights and mocks the absurdities of society in this post-consumer phase of late capitalism. Politics, economics, and everyday life are reflected in the distorted mirror of Dawicki's art of resistance. Established norms of moral, spiritual and social order are challenged and put on trial. His Tree of Knowledge attempts to zoom in, with the artist's micro-lens, on the primordial moments of human ethics and the foundation of knowledge. The artist re-enacts the scene from the Bible, where Adam and Eve consume forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, thus committing a sin and consequently being denied access to the Tree of Life. Dawicki's masquerade is grotesque and steeped in irony. Stripping away pathos with the magic of a sorcerer, he narrates an epic of desire in an age at the end of innocence. The fruit is half consumed; the judgment is suspended and, one might suppose, hope for a new history is reborn.
Aneta Grzeszykowska
Black, 2007, 12:00 min
Black is a 12-minute film fantasy on the theme of a total abyss. The
artist's naked body travels through an intangible and indefinable black
space, disappearing in it only to reappear. The film combines analog trick filming and computer animation.
Igor Omulecki
Untitled, 2007, 7:07 min
Abstraction is the "language" of modernist art, as well as its greatest invention. It is a visualization of narcissistic fantasies of art indulging in dreams of absolute autonomy, asemantic and antimimetic sovereignty which guarantees a critical position toward the social and political reality. Abstraction was a sign of the silence of art and of the disinterestedness it postulated. It was a figure which supported the fetishization of pure opticality, an expression of the highest ethical standards on which the ethos of the modernist artist was founded, and the most perfect realization of epistemological ideals of art (i.e. of "instantaneous and unmediated insight"). It has become a favorite point of criticism for artists and critics with postmodernist inclinations who took delight in deconstructing it and pointing out the naivety of its assumptions, its utopianism, escapism, conformism, immaturity, lack of consciousness, entanglement in metaphysics etc. Despite those attacks, abstraction is still present in the sphere of art. Igor Omulecki Untitled has as its characteristics numerous references to the modernist poetics and a desire to revitalize it. Both types of abstraction, geometric and nongeometric, are revitalized, interfere with each other, and create interesting configurations with the "poetics of realism" (which uses representations of physical reality). The earlier desire to free art from the reality principle, actualized in modernist abstraction, has been displaced in contemporary artists' abstract videos by a relation of interference, of interaction and mutual exchange of influences (or, rather, "gifts") between the sphere of pure abstraction and the sphere of representations of reality. The relation between the two spheres, however, is an uneven one. Abstraction in this context becomes a strategy which allows for a peculiar kind of subordination of reality to art. It becomes a method of transforming, of adding a touch of poetry and a personal dimension to the otherwise deadly serious reality.
Agnieszka Brzezanska
Blue Movie, 2008, 4:19 min
Discussing her film, artist Agnieszka Brzezanska maintains: "Actually we are three: me (with a camera), and Anetta Mona-Chisa and Lucia Tkacova, the artists I asked to be my models. Female torsos, or rather their shadows, are seen dancing against a blue-lit background, the kind of blue that comes from a video projector when turned on before the play button is pressed. My main idea about this video is liberation and joy. When we look at the works of Anetta Mona-Chisa and Lucia Tkacova, who work together, we can understand the reason for that. They are pure, emancipated muses, now making fun of the remains of the old paradigms; they make brilliant conceptual works, analyzing their special sexual blond powers and their positions in art.