"You're telling me that, but what do you want with that, What are you aiming at?"
On Wilhelm Sasnal's Films
Łukasz Ronduda
Film and Painting
While film and painting provide the space in which Wilhelm Sasnal's art develops, the space of these two media corresponds with a realm stretching between the symbolic and the imaginary. In Adam Szymczyk's words, Sasnal's painting is "a way to prove what a photograph cannot, as it must always start from something existent—even if it is able to change its object endlessly—though after all it is a way to record things. Painting is a way to observe ambiguous and dramatic changing of conditions."1 Traditionally, filmmaking is more closely connected with reality, objectivism, technology, rational and analytical approaches to the world, whereas painting usually entails imagination, subjectivism, handicraft, spirituality. In Sasnal's painting and films, these values interact and interchange—his painting is frequently subordinated to typical film-like qualities (e.g. simple recording of reality's appearances), whereas his films are almost always painting-like (through the film's specific editing, camerawork, development process, constant emphasis on its materiality).
Sasnal's film and painting are deeply embedded in the artist's existence; they are akin to approaches he employs in order to record—through the filter of his imagination—his relations with the world, with the place in which he resides permanently or stays temporarily, with his family (mostly his wife Anka), friends, and chance acquaintances which he makes on his journeys. Never parting with an 8mm or a 16mm film camera (another proof of his devotion to working with what is regarded as "obsolete" media—as in the case of painting), he has for years continuously visualized his "distribution and redistribution of reality" by giving it a psychedelic and music video-like form. In Sasnal's films and painting, the fantasies of art's autonomy and the subject's autonomy collaborate, reinforce each other, and examine themselves narcissistically while using each other as a mirror. Today, in the wake of a period of postmodernist deconstructions, the categories of the subject's autonomy and art's autonomy seem to count among the most disgraced categories of modern cultural studies and philosophy. Although seemingly long dead and buried, these categories, much like ghosts, indefatigably keep on haunting the space of our everyday existence and perception of art. These phenomena and the related experience—feeling of subjective autonomy and sovereignty, which is impervious to complete blurring (as postulated by postmodernism) of the individual being in the "torrent of influences of the outer world" and unaware of the process—are now there as illegal obsessive fantasies of which we cannot rid ourselves, although being aware of their "impossibility." These obscene ideas, which we sometimes "launch" consciously, or by which we sometimes let ourselves be carried away, are quite a natural reaction to boredom, vacuity, and stubborn durability of the "reality absolute," "order of truth," together with over-formalized, over-objectified, and over-rationalized means of communication which are constitutive for this order. Sasnal's painting and film work illustrates a transfer of these categories, once very "real" and with solid ontological foundations, into what appears as a very ethereal realm of fantasy. As a result of the transfer, these categories now acquire strategic and tactical value in the subject's (here also an artistic subject) struggle with reality: now, "it is the very imaging of oneself as an autonomous … and powerful person that is more important than being one"; "so, even if the transcendental idea of autonomy … may be false in terms of the order of truth, as a fantasy, it has a causative value."2 This evident falsification, error, lie vs. reality, seems to be what keeps the fantasy of an autonomous subject and an autonomous art lively and anarchically vigorous. What makes these imaginary creations expressive and powerful today is not an authentic faith in fulfillment of their promise but rather their anarchical boldness, courage to provoke, change and transgress against the status quo of the reality which this promise—or perhaps its imaginary fulfillment—creates.
Music
The source of Sasnal's film projects is experimentation with the film's internal picture-sound relations, an everlasting core tradition of the Polish avant-garde and neo-avant-garde: from very analytical works made by the Themersons in the 1940s (e.g. Oko i ucho [The Eye and the Ear]) or by the Workshop of the Film Form in the 1970s (Klaskacz [A Clapper], Exercise [?wiczenie], Pr?ba II [An Attempt II]), to highly expressive punk music videos by Gajewski (Tilt Back) or Robakowski (video clips of the Moskwa punk rock band). A film particularly important for Sasnal in this experimental background was Koncert (The Concert) (1982, dir. Micha? Tarkowski). The influence of this unusual music video-like work is particularly discernible in the style of his respective films.
In this context, it ought to be emphasized that there is in fact a symbiotic union of film and painting in Sasnal's work. With the interaction and interchange between the two, his art still pulsates with energy and keeps on intriguing one with its freshness. The artist himself stressed on more than one occasion that he was modeled by the aesthetics of musical subcultures, by the visuality of off-mainstream music videos rather than by a specific artistic tradition. It is in underground music that Sasnal finds energy, vigor, and intensity—values which are strongly present in life, although hardly found in art any more. In order to underscore the significance of this tradition for his art, Sasnal organized a punk rock concert as a part of his painting and film exhibition entitled "Wzorzec kilograma" [The Standard of the Kilogram] (Foksal Gallery Foundation, 2006), in which he actively participated himself (as a vigorous pogo dancer); he used the concert as an opportunity to create a space of extra-visual experience, a space of "energetic communication," as postulated by Andrzej Paw?owski, where no specific sense is to be transferred but rather "direct" intensive and absorbing ties are to be developed—ties which are difficult to mediate (and thereby to observe from a distance) whether in language or picture. It seems, therefore, that Sasnal's film and painting—which stretch between a transfer of information and an aporia of sense (without ever reaching either extreme)—are produced in a constant correspondence with music. In one of his interviews, he asserted: "Sometimes I think that painting will be around as long as there are songs." His film Marfa (screened during the exhibition under discussion), which evolves into an alternative music clip of a punk rock band, is likewise a kind of going back to the musical roots, as outlined above: an attempt to underline Sasnal's original inspiration with music videos. The final shape of Marfa is determined by co-occurrence of a syndrome of characteristic features in all of Sasnal's films. Alongside the music video-like nature, these include the so-called "personal cinema" and poststructuralist cinema.
Personal Cinema
Personal cinema flourished among Polish artists during the communist regime; it was made in private, as a response to difficulties encountered while trying to speak freely in public. From the times of Miron Bia?oszewski's short films, "personal cinema" developed alongside the artist's life, and focused on recording life's banalities, fantasies, masquerades, etc. The films themselves were less important than the "social" effect they generated, how they strengthened ties, intimacy, and friendship between people who came together to make such a film. The term "personal cinema" was coined by J?zef Robakowski, an artist who conceived of a new (more narrative, intimate, subjective) formula for the cinema in a period marked by dislike of the over-objectified and over-rationalized structuralist cinema. On the technological level, the development of the "personal cinema" formula closely coincided with the emergence of a small, private and portable version of the film camera (or video camera), which enabled an unprecedented closeness of the medium to the cameraman's life. This closeness put him in full control of the production process. Robakowski commented on the "personal cinema" as being "a way to remember oneself, to record your own mentality, gestures, … mental tensions which turned up together with the reality… You make Personal Cinema when you fail on everything …, [it is] a direct projection of the filmmaker's thoughts. Relieved of all fashions and aesthetic rules or fixed language codifications, it stands close to the filmmaker's life."3 In this context, Antoni Antoniszczak's radical auteurist, anarchist and grotesque "personal cinema" is also worth a mention as particularly inspiring for Sasnal's filmmaking.4 For years, the artist has not parted with his camera, developing a kind of a film notebook in which he has recorded his relations with reality, with the places to he feels attached [Przewodnik po Nowej Hucie (A Guide to Nowa Huta) (1997/98), Tarn?w [City of Tarnow] (2000), Ulica Worcella (Worcell Street) (1999), Filmy z Europy ?rodkowo-Wschodniej (Films from Central and Eastern Europe (1999)], the time spent with his family, with his wife Anka, his son Kacper (e.g. Mojave, 2006). Similarly, Marfa generally seems to be Sasnal's record of his presence at the eponymous town in Texas, USA: "I got on this film everyone I met in Marfa, almost everyone around, which was 50 people or so. Some local skaters. The only music band there, called S.P.I.C. [Satanic Punk International Conspiracy], a very good one, by the way, etc.," the artist attested.
Poststructuralist Cinema
Another characteristic feature of Sasnal's films is a multi-level toying with the legacy of structuralist cinema.5 In Marfa, for instance, in addition to Sasnal's typical material and editorial references to structuralist cinema, he makes a perverse reference to the minimalists' works by turning the entire film into a specific "deconstruction in process," into a record of a sophisticated material entropy of a vehicle (one may also observe an ironic reference to Donald Judd's work as a metal stack is formed of ripped-off car doors, resembling one of the minimalist's famous sculptures). In the context of references to conceptual minimalist art, one should also mention the tensions which Sasnal builds in his films between picture and subtitles.6 Another Polish conceptual media neo-avant-garde tradition of the 1970s worth reminding among Sasnal's references is Natalia LL's films made as a part of her "permanent formalization" strategy. The strategy (as in many of Sasnal's films, observable particularly in his recent American projects) consisted in simple recording of a number of activities regarded as banal (moving from place to place, consumption, speaking words, sleeping, making love). In these films, Natalia LL entered into a "meaning-generating dialogue with reality" which had no such meaning prior to her interference, trying to highlight the impossibility of a "cold," impersonal, machine-like view (for which the science-minded media conceptualism had strived). In his filmmaking, Sasnal not only shares with Natalia LL a fascination with this basic process of lending meaning to the world through the creative activity of a subject, but he also (like many conceptual artists) frequently draws our attention to the picture's frame. Nonetheless, Sasnal brings the problems dealt with in minimalist media analyses (a characteristic of, say, the Workshop of the Film Form in the 1970s) into a completely different dimension, being conscious of the fact that he creates his art in an epoch when production processes have been subjected to an identical fetishization as complete products of such processes. In his films and painting, Sasnal seems to analyze the same phantasmal potential of a "simple" act of adding a frame (to a film or a picture) which distinguishes an imaginary reality from actuality. He seems to be bothered by the same quandary which bothered Zizek when he asked how does a phantasmal incorporeal event emerge out of a medley of bodies, corporeal causes.7 Moreover, Sasnal seems to ask why the understanding of the mechanism of frame-adding (which post-modernity seems to have analyzed in every possible way) not only fails to destroy the illusion of "effect" it generates, but even reinforces it (much like the artist who demonstratively leaves all "noise," "scratches," and "defects" which underline the celluloid's materiality, and balances this type of activity by building his narration, a phantasmal story-world). Through his ceremonious adding of a frame, fixing of the picture's border, Sasnal shows the dialectics of within and without (so vital for modernist artists). This border forms an "edge" discussed by Crapanzano, a dividing line between the imaginary and the symbolic. In this context it is worth mentioning that Sasnal is a specific "medialist" only if we compare his film oeuvre to the "filmmaking" activities of Pawel Althamer, who dematerializes the edge—the frame—by bringing it to reality. With a couple of gestures, words or movements imposing the proper symbolic context (frame) in his "films," he makes us look at a given excerpt of reality "through a window of fantasy" offered to us by the artist himself. Sasnal, in turn, while operating in a "lab area" of art, brings this edge into the field of perception (making it tangible), he sets it deeply in our everyday existence and keeps it up to date in various contexts of our relations with reality.
Chè vuoi?
Let us sum up: in the context of Sasnal's art, both repressive, over-rationalized postmodern artistic discourses (with their views of what is obsolete, what is impossible, what is unseemly, what is long deconstructed, etc) and national martyrology or pop culture discourses may be looked at through the prism of the Lacanian/Zizekian question Che vuoi? (What do you want?)—"You're telling me that, but what do you want with it, what are you aiming at? … you demand something of me, but what do you really want, what are you aiming at through this demand?" 8 (Or, perhaps, you want in fact something opposite?). By asking in such a way, the artist seems to demonstrate an arrogant and anarchist approach. One might believe that he defies obvious truths of the symbolic order, which is countered by the subject's desire and related fantasy ("irrational, phantasmal desire for resistance"). What Sasnal proposes, however, is a different kind of anarchist imagination, which does not cover up gaps in the symbolic order (as imagination usually did), but exposes them actively and stresses the impossibility to fully assign the subject to any ideological order whatsoever. Hence he shows that every attempt to define the subject ("structurally fractured") by means of language is synchronically accompanied by an imaginative attempt to escape from this definition. The Ch? vuoi? model is subsequently transferred to the viewer's relationship with Sasnal's work as well. For instance, Adam Szymczyk comments on Sasnal's painting as being "like a tease … because he relates to something which makes you think 'Okay, I think I know more or less what I see.' But then you have to ask yourself: is that really so?"9 This description also corresponds with the tension which in ?i?ek results from the very nature of a symbolic order: "So we might say that while on the one hand it is a natural tendency of a human subject to accede to a specific outlook, to devote oneself completely to a specific idea etc., on the other hand, it shows a countertendency to negate or question such accession, which results from the very nature of a reference to a symbolic order."10 Sasnal, as evident particularly in his films, sides decisively with the anarchist countertendency, though his critique suspends the language of the criticized system rather than operating it; he employs—in a deliberately "absurd" manner—imagination-related extra-textual and extra-symbolic values, linking them in an extraordinary manner with the visuality (the picture and its "muteness"), which preserves its power of questioning the rules of symbolic language and propositions decreed by it. It is thus no wonder that Sasnal describes his art as "deluxe punk."
Notes
1. Adam Szymczyk, Ulrich Loock, Wilhelm Sasnal: Przewodnik Krytyki Politycznej (Warsaw, 2007) [Polish].
2. Agata Bielik Robson, Duch Powierzchni: rewizja romantyczna i filozofia (Krakow: 2004), p. 151 [Polish].
3. J?zef Robakowski, "Kino w?asne," in J?zef Robakowski (ed.), Teczka 12 (Lublin, 1992), p. 312 [Polish].
4. Sasnal often uses non-camera methods known, for instance, from Antoniszczak's 1997, in which paint was applied directly onto the film.
5. What Sasnal's early works have in common is fascination with an 8mm camera; they even appear as a comment on its practical possibilities. In some of them, he literally focuses on the technique, equipment, and the recording process itself (Film amatorski bez b??d?w [An Amateur Film without Errors], Osiem milimetr?w [Eight Millimeters], Kilkadziesi?t sekund ?le wywo?anej ta?my filmowej [Several Dozen Seconds of a Badly Developed Film]); on other occasions, while ostensibly telling a story, he also explicitly exhibits a medium in the form of numerous defects and errors visible on screen.
6. For example, Tarn?w (City of Tarnow), Materac (Mattress), Jej usta (Her Mouth), Samolot skry? si? w chmurach (The Plane Hid in the Clouds), M?odzie? (Youth), Przewodnik po Nowej Hucie (A Guide to Nowa Huta) (the last three at a meeting point of sound, picture, and subtitles). Sasnal unusually often employs writing as a carrier for a verbal message in his films. He introduces the subtitles in separate frames, in a manner which resembles the way dialogue parts were introduced in the first silent films, though at the same time staying very close to the comic book aesthetics also used in his painting.
7. Slavoj ?i?ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989).
8. Ibid., p. 111.
9. Szymczyk and Loock (n. 1).
10. ?i?ek (n. 7).