Arnolvideofini – 1434-1992

Józef Robakowski’s works belonging to Collection II, created between 1984 and 1992, reflect the formal issues, as well as social and existential questions that preoccupied him, as well as the problems articulated in the 1970s decade, when he was one of the founding members of the Film Form Workshop (Warsztat Formy Filmowej, 1970–1977); a period of crucial importance to his artistic activity. At the beginning of Robakowski’s creative path lay photography, as he experimented with work methods and photo-object making. These experiences significantly influenced his practice in the field of experimental film, in which he began to be involved in the early 1960s. He focused on innovative explorations related to the workshop and methods of creating a filmic image. His vast oeuvre is supported by wide-ranging theoretical and methodological thought and by reflection on art history; hence his artistc oeuvre should not be read in isolation. His numerous manifestos, declarations and explications of his artistic assumptions lend interpretive support to commentators on his work. At successive stages of his explorations, Robakowski took up new problems and reached for new forms of expression; suffice it to mention his “mechano-biological recordings” or the concept of “one’s own cinema”. He returned to them in later years, supplementing them with autobiographical and private elements or observations of a sociological nature.

For the reasons of both chronology and the discussed problems, a review of Robakowski’s output must begin with the film Nearer – Farther from the series Dedications (1984), since it exemplifies Robakowski’s reflection on the relationship between the camera operator and the camera itself; it is a synthesis of action and its registration. The film, described as the most structural work of the 1980s, is seemingly a simple test of the camera. The operator issues succinct messages: “closer – farther”, simultaneously lengthening or shortening the focal length, with the result that the camera zooms in or out of a dark rectangle against the window; this rectangle is a mirror in which, after the command “closer”, the artist’s face appears. His image appears a few more times when the zoom lens stops gauging the light on the window and focuses on the mirror. In a small room, the artist is alone with the instrument of his work, looking at its properties and technical shortcomings, by means of which he can see his face against the window. The commands he issues are accompanied by noise coming from outside, the throbbing sounds of renovation work, which, together with the urban landscape stretching beyond the window, violate the sterility of the workshop.

Robakowski recorded the view of the city for over twenty years, creating the video-epic From My Window (1978–1999; in Collection II)[1]. At the time, the eye of the camera served him to peep into the rhythm of the city and the lives of its inhabitants. In Nearer – Farther, as the artist wove autotelic reflections on the video image and the tools of its registration, the outside world lay beyond his interest. The language of expression that typifies Nearer – Farther was derived from the explorations of the creators of the Film Form Workshop, to which the work is dedicated. Working on the borderline between cinematography and contemporary art, members of the Workshop employed conceptual strategies in order to reach the primary properties of film, purifying it of the sediments of literature and culturally sanctioned meanings. In that period, the demand to free film from its narrative message had a political and ideological dimension, as the artists were looking for a language and gestures that were unsuitable as instruments of manipulation and could not be used to propagandistic purposes.

The focus on the film medium, the analysis of its structure and language, would always remain an essential component of Robakowski’s artistic search. Over time, he introduced his own person into the realm of exploration. He became particularly interested in the relationship between himself and the camera. The work tool ceased to serve solely for objective registration and to be an object of research experiments; instead, it became an extension of the artist, an element of a biomechanical relationship. The concept of the causality and creativity of a machine was close to Robakowski’s heart, prompting him to rethink the category of authorship. As a result, he produced film forms characterised by a non-anthropocentric insight into his own physicality, emotionality and expressiveness. The duration of these films is equal to the time of their recording, allowing for the transfer of the creator’s impressions to the viewer. Observing the relationship between his own organism and the tool of a filmmaker’s work, Robakowski developed the concept of mechano-biological recordings, with the camera turning into a transmitter and the film, into a record of the artist’s psycho-physical states.

The films: Dancing with Trees (1985), Come to Me (1987), Ouch, My Leg Hurts… (1990) and Search! (1990) are examples of such recordings. Each was made in a single take, from the position of the artist, who himself does not appear in the frame (or is only present through a shadow and a fragment of his shoes, as in Come to Me). The camera records the trajectory and dynamics of his movement: Robakowski walks, turns and spins with his head up in the woods; he walks along the white line painted on the football pitch; he walks with difficulty along a forest path; he adopts the perspective of a dog, tracking an undefined object. The images are accompanied by sounds – the increasingly rapid humming of syllables, the rhythmic “pam, pam, pam” spoken off-screen by Bogdan Konopka, Robakowski’s voice as he complains of leg pain or issues the command “seek”. The works, devoid of linear narration and conventional film illusion, are a record of the artist’s subjective feelings: the experience of space, which at times is so dynamic that it verges on loss of orientation and blurring of the perceived image, and the experience of pain, breathlessness and fatigue resulting from nervously looking around.

The trend that constitutes a continuation of the mechano-biological recordings includes the slightly differently constructed video La – Lu La – Lu from the Exercises for video, colour series (1985). In this case, too, Robakowski remains outside the frame and his presence is indicated by his voice synchronised with the image. The swings that are being filmed sway like pendulums, set in motion by a force independent of him, initiating his activity, as it were, and provoking him to follow their rhythm. Unlike in the works discussed above, Robakowski does not use a handheld camera in motion here; the camera stands still while he, controlling the focal length, moves the image in and out of zoom. In time with swinging movement, Robakowski utters the syllable la when the image zooms away and lu when it moves closer, giving them different tone and intensity. Each time the melodious, soft and high la clashes with the strong, short and low lu, naturally suggesting a change in mood and feeling. Robakowski wrote of the video as a “mirror for psychology”, “a notebook for relating my relations with the outside world”.

The works Cars, cars! (1985) and The Song of a Mood (1987) fall within the formula of “one’s own cinema”. Both, like Nearer – Farther and From My Window, were recorded in Robakowski’s flat, in a room overlooking the high-rise housing estate in Łódź, known as the Manhattan. In the case of the films From My Window and Cars, cars!, the window “opens” onto urban reality; in the case of Nearer – Farther and The Song of a Mood, the landscape provides a backdrop for the artist talking about the film medium and for his debate with his own image. The film Cars, cars! belongs to a group of works that constitute manifestations of Robakowski’s engaged attitude towards social reality. Here, his interests focus on the rhythm of the city, the dynamics of passing cars, recorded with a fast-panning camera set at a single point. The video recording is accompanied by Robakowski’s voice, commenting off-screen, with constantly varying intonation and speed of uttering words, on what is happening in the street. The energy of the urban landscape is contrasted with the calmness of the space in which the camera is placed, which introduces a tension that reflects the author’s emotional state.

The Song of a Mood, in turn, is a video-performance, in which Robakowski, pointing the camera at himself, creates an etude on the topic of his own condition. The silhouette (or rather “bust”) of the artist, sitting in the foreground against the backdrop of a window, is dark, his facial features almost invisible. This is an effect of deliberately inappropriate exposure, a technique often used by Robakowski in his polemic against the conventions and aesthetics of traditional cinema. The static camera films the artist reciting syllables and pounding out the rhythm with his fingers against the table, thus laying him bare before the viewer, revealing the process of self-analysis and creating a window into a private area. Autobiographical and private elements have been an important theme in Robakowski’s work since the mid-1980s. Critics commenting on his work associate this turn towards the observation of himself, and of the life around him, with the political repression he had suffered and perceive it in terms of internal emigration, where, as Robakowski wrote, “no fashions or aesthetic rules or established linguistic codifications” apply, and where “one’s own cinema” itself is situated “close to the life of the filmmaker”.

Autobiographical and private motifs allow Robakowski to look at the world with irony on the one hand, and on the other, they serve him to construct his own mythology. In The Glasses (1992), Robakowski’s face fills the narrow frame as he weaves an exceedingly personal narrative about his spiritual condition. A pretext for talking about emotions is provided by the spectacles of his late grandfather Stanisław. It is around them, and the dilemma of whether or not to put them on, that he builds a monologue about depression, anxiety, mental collapse and its impact on the perception of reality. His face, recorded in the negative and turned almost 180 degrees to the side, looks unreal. He seems to be behind glass, “on the other side” as it were. The concentration of image and word, however, brings his story close to the viewer, enfolds the viewer in its intensity.

In the sensual erotic film Joseph’s Touch (1989), Robakowski recalls three experiences of homosexuality which he had as a child, a teenager and an adult man. In one interview, he recalled the homosexual games he had witnessed and participated in at the orphanage where he was reared. Episodes of his intimate story are illustrated with images from the life of a gay couple Robakowski met in Montreal. The warm, soothing shots of the two men contrast with the artist’s words, spoken in a clipped manner that conveys a sense of danger.

A creator’s output, condition and identity are a recurrent topic in Robakowski’s oeuvre. In a performance made in front of a camera My Video-Masochisms II (1990), he inflicts physical pain on himself; he pushes a fork into his cheek, presses a broken bottle against it, cuts his earlobes with scissors, wraps his face in a metal chain. The work grew out of the experience of the pain he had felt having accidentally hit his finger with a hammer. My Video-Masochisms II are an ironic commentary on the productions of performers who mutilate their bodies. Robakowski is sceptical of art as a medium for experiencing pain, thus casting doubt on the authenticity of films recording masochistic performances. In one of his manifestos, he wrote that “art does not hurt […]. It is a mockery of true pain; it is merely a semblance of the artist’s actual experience”.

The video Mr Joseph’s Last Will (1990) was used in one of the three epitaphs that Robakowski created between 1966 and 1994, in an installation entitled Mr Deer (Self-Epitaph). The static shot from a bird’s-eye perspective shows the artist lying on a red and pink carpet with deer antlers attached to his head. Holding a burning cigarette in his mouth and exhaling smoke, the performer delivers a longer, unintelligible monologue; the words are gibberish, as if he were speaking with his mouth full. Robakowski commented on his self-epitaph: “Today, after almost thirty years, another epitaph appears, this time of ‘Mr Deer’, to personify the desire for arrogant gestures. It is meant to decry the miserable fate of the contemporary artist as a naïve fool, a bootlicker and creator of beautiful ideas and things…”. Robakowski’s ironic commentary refers to himself; by drawing on the stereotypical associations associated with deer (in Polish: jeleń, which means ‘loser’), he creates an image of a naïve man, feeding on ideas, but at the same time endowed with a creative drive, a force that compels him to make “arrogant gestures”.

Works that engage in a dialogue with the works of other artists, including Katarzyna Kobro and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, hold an important place in Robakowski’s oeuvre. They are part of his hunt for his own genealogy. These explorations refer to the methodology of art history, to comparative practices and attempts to define the pupil-master relationship and the sources of his own creative production. In those works, Robakowski combines the workshop of an art historian and an artist; he creates “art about art”. He is the author of films that feed on other works of art; he makes someone else’s experience his own, internalising it, and follows in the footsteps of his predecessors. All these procedures result in his defining his artistic identity and formulating a self-definition of his art.

Arnolvideofini – 1434–1992 (1992) refers to a distant past. First of all, attention must be drawn to the chronological range included in the work’s title, suggesting a continuity between Robakowski’s work and that of the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck. Robakowski made use of details of two works by the Netherlandish masters: Adoration of the Mystic Lamb from the Ghent Altarpiece (completed 1432) and The Arnolfini Portrait (1434)[2]. He described the film as a “votive picture”, thus showing his respect for the work of the van Eyck brothers. The structure of the film is based on alternating quotations from details of both masterpieces, extracting elements important to the artist from the whole composition. The image of an altar is featured in a special way: it appears on pages from an album, which placed side by side, form a diptych. They show close-ups of the faces of Adam and Eve. A detail of the Ghent Altarpiece is used to extol the oeuvre of the van Eycks. However, the fact that these are reproductions from the album robs the work of its sacred dimension. At a certain point, the artist briefly covers the faces of Adam and Eve with his crossed hands, and images from the Arnolfini portrait begin to dominate among the recalled details.

As the title of the film indicates, Robakowski perceives the binding date to be the year when the portrait was created, not the completion of the altarpiece two years earlier. This seems to mean that the secular aspect of the van Eycks’ work is central to Robakowski’s narrative. A common ground emerges from the dialogue between the work of the contemporary artist and the oeuvre of the old masters, clear for instance in the relationship between the former’s studio and the interior captured in the portrait of the Arnolfini couple. As commentators on Robakowski’s art point out, the affinity of his explorations with the paintings by the van Eyck brothers is based on “an attitude of particular creative exaltation, an attitude of concentration and a profound treatment of the subject matter”. In addition, the oeuvre of the three artists is permeated by a “peculiar sacrum of art” free of transcendental, sacred messages. For Robakowski, The Arnolfini Portrait is the brothers’ key achievement because of its secular and private dimension, close to his own explorations. The dialogue between the works of the van Eycks and the works by Robakowski has the nature of a dynamic exchange and constant alteration of viewpoints. Robakowski looks at fifteenth-century paintings while at the same time he analyses the properties of video film and the relationship that the modern medium has with traditional painting. In doing so, he keeps a close eye on his own actions and decisions, and his reflections on his own work are mirrored in the questions he asks of van Eycks’ art.

Robakowski was also active as a documenter of social life, especially of the alternative milieu with which he was close. Among his works in this area is A Party with Lutosławski (1987), that resulted from his re-editing the video Łódź Kaliska (1986) which he had shot together with Witold Krymarys. It was footage from an arranged situation: an unrestrained party shared by members of the eponymous group and artists associated with the Pitch-In Culture group. Robakowski and Krymarys filmed their walk through the city, which ended with a party at The Loft, an important informal meeting place on the map of avant-garde Łódź. Actions carried out in the streets, in the Balaton Bar and at The Loft were intended to form the visual element for a music video that was to accompany a popular song celebrating the working-class Łódź. The collective performance got out of hand, ending with the destruction of an accordion that had been someone’s keepsake, and what the footage shows is, in reality, a sequence of dramatic, over-expressive gestures and an increasing collapse. A year later, Robakowski reinterpreted the video: he re-edited the recorded material, slowed it down, changed the colours, and chose Witold Lutosławski’s Symphony No. 3 as background music. In A Party with Lutosławski, background music is unrelated to the footage, rendering the recorded situation even more absurd and reinforcing the element of nihilism inherent in it. The latter was important in Robakowski’s work as a tool for creating quasi-artistic concepts that constituted a response to the shallowness of conventional forms and narratives.

Izabela Kopania

translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz

[1] See I. Kopania, Zbiór otwarty. Prace z Kolekcji II Galerii Arsenał w Białymstoku i Podlaskiego Towarzystwa Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych / Open set. Works from Kolekcja II of Galeria Arsenał in Białystok and Podlaskie Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych, Białystok 2012, pp. 196–197 (editor’s note).

[2] When Robakowski produced Arnolvideofini – 1434–1992, both pieces he referred to were attributed to the brothers Jan and Hubert van Eyck. However, recent studies proved that Hubert van Eyck, the older of the brothers, died in 1426. Consequently, both works quoted are recognized today as Jan van Eyck’s pieces.