Terrible Citizens
Terrible citizens, do androids dream of mechanical landscapes?
Terrible flats. In terrible flats/Terrible citizens lead terrible lives.
Aleksandra Urbańska in crimson silk dress is a wonderful hostess, tactfully introducing her guests to each other and showing them the best perspectives to admire the paintings. Galeria A?s current exhibition is worth stepping by for this pleasure alone. An intimate room, a modest display, a daylight landscape, a nocturne and two fractals.
Maria Szkop, the author of the paintings, sets abstractness against the figuration of artistic pose. It is an anti-formalistic strategy, very rightly called by Tymek Borowski* the New Bourgeoisie. Rightly, because this name suits the new group that emerged among art consumers. The new middle class. Marta Szkop?s works deliver to those new consumers of symbolic goods everything they search for. Repeatability and anonymity of technique, while making it very individual, adjoin a particular vision of Nature. It is Agamben?s saved night of nature**, which reaches homeostasis through a quiet suicide of the human kind.
The vernissage is not a documentation of this strategy, but rather a display of its side effects. We can assume that there are two reasons for hiding the act of production. The obscenity of the work in progress itself, as indicated by Slavoj Žižek. It is not a coincidence that villains? hideouts tend to be places of constant, frantic work. Which brings it close to an act of terrorism. It could also be coming from the theatre of painting and drawing, the anonymity of a craftsman, like the disappearing immaculate Hertirze factories in one of the plays by Pasolini.
However, a grain of parnassianism is inherent in the whole thing. In a traditional way no less. Once, Degas and Paul Valery went together to see an exhibition at the Salon. They were admiring a tree, painted with utmost care, with its leaves as tiny as parsley. ?This had to be terribly boring to paint?, said Valery, which angered the great painter: ?Be quiet! if it wasn?t boring it wouldn?t be a work of genius!? Something of that constant tension between hard, back-breaking, mind-numbing work, and its intoxicating effect remains in Maria Szkop?s works. Same characterises academic exercises and studies by Leonardo or Rembrandt. The problem is the technique, or its level. Precisely, its technicality, the regularity of needles, leaves, dabs and spatters, the way each of them were attended to separately.
A scary nonsense grows layer by layer,/They move about the jungle of events like ghosts.
Two of the landscapes are characterised by fractal regularity and no less regular twists caused by the limitations of a human hand (which to the author seems to be as interesting as the creation of a landscape). Like among Szczerbowski?s works, here we find a clinch of the natural and the mechanical, the organic and the technical. Nature, undergoing a process of mechanical reproduction, overgrows the canvas like a parody of life, a mockery of its force. A connotation with flowers created on windows when it?s freezing is very adequate. The trick and the key to this travesty of life (and reason) was displayed by Thomas Mann in the first paragraphs of Doctor Faustus. The quartz flowers imitating heliotropism via chemical mechanics, the shells covered with random patterns, so deceivingly resembling the signs of forgotten alphabets, finally the buzz of the big bang, in which for years now we?ve searched for the message from the Other.
This is the source of the suspicious tranquillity emanating from those kitschy stills. It is the world which is a parody of the world as a logical universe, a thoughtless an sterile repetition. The saved night of nature is Nature free from meaning.
This peaceful and boring repeatedness leads us towards the source of art mentioned in the title of the exhibition. Towards beauty. Only they forgot to warn us that the beauty in question is of mathematical nature, as in the first part of Kant?s Critique of Judgement, the beauty of which the best example is the soothing repeatability of wallpaper patterns. It becomes employed as a weapon against pure kitsch, those moments of existence which, when captured, always look somewhat amateurish.
We are convenient witnesses to the catastrophe which quietly happens within our sensorium and in the depth of the canvas. It is an act of reactivity. Silent ostracism touching the aesthetics of sublimity. Apollo is a cruel and vengeful god. In this ethernal petrified ?now? (like the world in Marsyas?s howl), the space of a fairytale, of virtual picture, of the mockery of eternity, a man is not possible. He is too meaningful. Although gods do live in harmony with their nature, this is not classical at all - it is a manifest of the production process mechanics, and not the result of being against loud mediocrity.
Just like Mariusz Tarkawian?s production a kind of prosthesis of social services in art world, Maria Szkop is a prosthesis of postcard-like pictures, sleek like chromolithographs. It is submission and resignation in the face of overwhelming means with no end and no goal. Though not without grace, and certain courage.
Like mold and soot it crawls down the wall/ The winter terror, the dark agony.
Looking at the daylight landscape with a lake, however, I wonder what that mysterious elevation of the lake shore is. The one which seems to protrude from the water surface? That shadow, that as-if-on-purpose badly painted reflection, that stumble bringing to mind the dissonance between a vision and its representation in practice? Is it a shore of a deep down secret, silent water run deep? An error disrupting the manner of representation, thus suggesting another way in which those landscapes exist? Tymek Borowski suggests that they exist just like nature, not its representation but repetition, not a fake but something both more and less. I do not know if it is not too much hope, or naivete. Still, that shore intrigues me, slanted in such uncomfortable way. Its naivete is at least suspicious. What would it conquer? The dissonance between the imaginary and the produced?
Katarzyna Kozyra?s In Art Dream Come True*** is an impressive nightmare-project about that dissonance between the imaginary, disegno and the realisation. Personally, I am closer to the presentiment of horror coming from the urban dream of solving all kinds of tensions. The timeliness of beauty seems more like an unhealthy happy ending. To me, those paintings are like snake eggs, where, although underneath a milky membrane, you can distinguish the reptile’ s shape.
*
Galeria A
**
Agata Bielik-Robson (2008),”Na pustyni”- kryptoteologie późnej nowoczesności,Kraków, Universitas, str. 402 -423.
***
Katarzyna Kozyra, Teatro Municipale in Trento, Włochy; Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 2003-2008
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