This is not a game

PM Gallery

Yael Bartana

Oskar Dawicki

Kwie Kulik

 Katerina Seda

 Sean Snyder

 Artur Žmijewski

Želimir Žilnik

Curators Ana Janevski and Tomasz Fudala

January 9 – January 30, 2010

At the beginning of the 1930s, the idea of a “home of the arts” was an emancipatory artistic gesture, for Ivan Meštrović adroitly exploited his position as regime artist and successfully translated a commission for a royal monument into a house of art.  From the very beginning the pavilion was conceived as one of the first circular exhibition venues anywhere at all.   The form of the rotunda in itself is a clear metaphor of the control of people, a panopticum and of all the permanent sites of “surveillance and penalisation / surveiller et punir”.  The “perfect” form of the building is ineluctably associated with the apparatus of power and control, discipline and organised life.  The more so that from its opening the building has gone through many transformations marked by incessant connections with government policies, ideology and culture, from art pavilion, to mosque, then from mosque to museum of the revolution and finally at the beginning of the nineties once again back to exhibition venue, when once the plan of Croatian president Franjo Tudjman to turn it into a Croatian pantheon had been bypassed.

The structure of the building itself and its turbulent history of changes of function are unavoidable references and sources of reflection for many works of art and previous exhibitions, and in this respect this show is no different. Still we have resolved to establish new links and open up a new space of critical thinking.

The name of the exhibition “Ovo nije igra / This is not a game” is a quote from a comment of Czech critic Tomas Pospisil on the piece of Katerina Seda “There is Nothing There” which is shown at the exhibition.

In 2002 Czech artist Katerina Seda convinced the inhabitants of the little Moravian village of Ponetovica, who had up to that time been complaining that “there was nothing there” to follow a plan of activities that was designed as a social game for the whole village. In other words, all of them did more or less the same actions at the same time, rode their bicycles, drank beer together in the afternoon and put out their lights in their houses at the same time.  As indicated in the subtitle of the work, they were simply playing a “game for an unlimited number of players”.

We cannot help but wonder if Seda’s work paradoxically combined determinations that are traditionally identified with totalitarianism (uniformity and synchronisation of activities) with a happy ending in which the artist seemingly resolves the totalitarian spell that burdens such activities.  Led on by these questions, we decided on works of artists in the centre of which are various forms of collaboration with a given community, through which a certain discipline is set up, codes of behaviour, and special structures of performance are determined.  We endeavoured to rise above the discourse of “relational aesthetics” or “community based or participatory” art projects.  We were more interested in the mechanisms of artistic power or authority and their outcomes that reveal (social) immanent tensions, conflicts and inequities, deconstruct the apparatus of power, and at the same time open up spaces for changing the courses of history.

In the film of Israeli artist Yael Bartana Mary Koszmary or Nightmare, the young leader of the Polish left and editor of the left-wing journal Krytyka Polityczna Sławomir Sierakowski invited three million Jews to return to Poland to change the lives of forty million Poles.  His speech uses the well known language of anti-Semitic, Catholic and communist propaganda, but with a positive inversion, propagating reconciliation in the name of the common future.  The invitation to return reveals a multilayered Polish history – and also its darkest side – the suppressed demons that turned into nightmares, which have to be accepted and adopted: collaboration with the Nazis and the lack of concern of part of the population of Poland during the persecutions of the Jews during World War II and indeed in the period after the war.

While the work of Yael Bartana draws attention to the traumas and symptoms of Polish society, the work of Polish artist Artur Žmijewski  deconstructs the apparatuses of power and discipline. Žmijewski  is one of the leading representatives of the “critically artistic” generation of Polish artists that have reflected the post-transformation period in the candid and brutal performance of their works.  In the video work KR WP soldiers of the Polish guard of honour march on the parade ground, carrying out the usual rituals and singing military songs.   In the second part of the film the soldiers still possess arms, but this time are marching naked, just in boots, with caps on their heads, in a ballroom.  The parody of the military rituals and the nude bodies of the soldiers, deprived of the protective armour of their uniforms, distort the conservative system of values, codes of conduct and natural laws.

In most of his works, which take their cue from the workshops that he attended in student days with his teacher Grzegorz Kowalski, and from the theory of open form of Polish architect Oskar Hansen, Žmijewski creates a certain context, a given situation, into which he brings a group of people and watches them reacting, behaving and coping, expressing radical manners of the formation of human society.

The inescapable question of to what extent an artist as an intellectual acting in public can develop the emancipatory potential of active political subject that takes sides, undertakes and encourages to action must derive from the end of the 1960s.  The paradigm shifts that occurred in  artistic work at the end of the 60s and the early 70s are a kind of motor for both today’s critical practices and new models of collaboration. For this reason we wanted to show works from that period, the film of Novi Sad director Želimir Žilnik and the works of Polish artists KwieKulik. The first films of Želimir Žilnik of the end of the 60s and early seventies are a mixture of fiction and documentary.  Always involved is direct “work” with marginalised figures, unable to be fitted into existing social frameworks: the unemployed, the homeless, abused Roma children; in more recent times with casualties of the contradictions of liberal policy and the democratisation of Europe and the market economy.  His films contain an important line of criticism and political engagement, not only during the socialist period, but today as well, and not merely in the local but also in the global context. Thus, in the film Inventory – Metzstrasse 11, shot during the time of Želimir Žilnik’s forced stay in Germany in the 1970s, the tenants of an old residential building in the centre of Munich are introduced; most of them are foreigners staying in Germany as guest-workers (Yugoslavs, Italians, Turks, Greeks and so on).    Individually, they introduce themselves in their native language, briefly setting out their main cares, their new hopes and plans for the future.

The artistic couple named KwieKulik, Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek have worked together on various projects, their work being marked by diverse artistic experiments aiming at linking up artistic and political activity, in the hope that in this way art will have greater social impact. The film Open Form is a group work, consisting of nine actions.   Inspired by the open form theory of Oskar Hansen, the artists experiment with a movie camera, making use of different methods and techniques, the aim being to record the processes of the creation of free forms of collaboration.   The action represented at the Zagreb exhibition under the title Open Form – School was shot in 1971 in an elementary school in Warsaw and is an excellent specimen of the so-called method of provocation with camera.  The artists suddenly interrupted a given situation filming the faces present in close-up.  Provoked by the direct filming, the pupils suddenly changed their behaviour to such an extent that the artists almost lost control of the situation.  The children organised a mini-revolution, wrote down the name of a particularly odious teacher on a piece of paper that they later burned on the fire in the middle of the gym hall.

The question of the responsibility that artists and artistic activity today bring up or which in public spheres even politics expect from them does not exclude consideration of the role of cultural and artistic institutions in the legitimation and strengthening of artistic practice as relevant social activity.

American artist Sean Snyder makes use of archival material of a Soviet documentary film of 965 about an exhibition of Mexican art in a rural museum in the Ukraine, that is, in the Soviet Union of that time.  By editing the material and inserting a commentary, Snyder refers to the constitutive elements of the exhibition, its presentation, the contextualisation of the works and the ancillary programmes.  In this way he refers to the social rituals and conventions of art, the lack of success of educational methods founded on propositions concerning the universality of aesthetic experience and at the same time to the collusion between ideology and art.

On the other hand the work List of Polish artist Oskar Dawicki continues the tradition of works of so-called institutional criticism started with the MOMA questionnaire of Hans Hacke in the Museum of Modern Art n New York in 1970 created as response to the ever greater need of artistic circles for a collective expression of support or opposition to a certain political decision, person or institution. The hyperproduction of such lists, the actual content of the petitions becomes of minor importance and in the foreground there is a collection of known and predictable names.  Devised for the collection of the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, and adopted for the Zagreb exhibition, the list of Dawicki is almost ideal.   Without superfluous demands or postulates the list is always current, indicating that the fate of the Polish and in this case the Croatian artistic scene is the history of lasting tensions between “us” and “them”.

Ana Janevski