Good Morning Tokyo

The photographs forming a part of Marek Wasilewski’s work Good Morning Tokyo were taken during the artist’s stay in Japan; but, perfectly fitting the landscape of life in any metropolis, they could just as well have been taken at any other place. They do not bear the mark of exoticism; Wasilewski is not looking for motifs that reflect that Japanese identity that so fascinates tourists. The three photographs are accompanied by a slide projection: a scene from the film Payback, with Mel Gibson putting a gun to the head of a terrified man. The photographs seem to document an uninteresting backdrop to everyday life: rows of blue buckets, a neglected bathroom, a platform trolley; yet they awaken a sense of danger in the viewer. They record traces of human presence, but, empty of the human staffage, they suggest that this is an abandoned world. The reality captured in the hyper-real images finds a seamless continuation in the projection of a cinematic fantasy which, although horrifying, feels like being easy to decode. In the context of the silent photographs, it is actually reassuring.

The work Good Morning Tokyo is highly understated. The viewer’s imagination suggests varied narratives, social and cultural contexts of the photographic representations. Visions that are extensions of this recorded fragment of the world unfold in the mind’s eye. The intensity of the work is based on the non-obvious relationship between the photographs and the slide. Wasilewski leaves the achievement of comprehending it to the viewer’s intuition, to their ability to search for connections between images with content that lacks affinities. He himself once declared that what interests him most in art is that which is not fully understood.

The title that Wasilewski gave to this work explains little. Is this really all he saw in Tokyo? Commentators on his photo/film collage base their interpretation on the impressions it can evoke. They suggest that the desolate scenery creates a sense of ominous emptiness. This intimation leads them to see the photographs as an attempt to convey the experience of cultural alienation. Wasilewski does this through frames of everyday life that do not represent anything peculiar. The stereotypical distinctiveness of Japan seemed perhaps too tame to connote otherness. Similarly, a scene from the American film is an image all too familiar to inspire fear.

Izabela Kopania

translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz

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The series of photographs by Marek Wasilewski entitled Good Morning Tokyo presents three pseudo-film stills, devoid of human presence, cityscapes marked by the activity of people who are nowhere to be seen. The final image in this sequence has been taken from an actual motion picture; it is an aggression-laden scene in which the actor Mel Gibson puts a gun to the head of a victim. This work presents a fluid progression in which reality captured in the photographs segues into fantasy beamed up on the projector.

Maria Janiszewska

An excerpt from the essay ‘The Curses of Fantasy’ by Maria Janiszewska, published in the exhibition catalogue discourski!, Galeria Arsenał, Białystok 2002

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Good morning Tokyo by Marek Wasilewski, encompasses both the familiarity and strangeness of the experiences that we find side by side when encountering a foreign country. Three fourths of the piece is made up of photos taken in Japan, placed close to the floor, showing quite normal spaces in the city. A steel trolley in a corner, a tiled and empty washroom, and rows of bright blue containers stored on shelves that look like dustbins. Beyond their formal qualities and the fact that they are devoid of people, the images lack any unusual characteristics. But read in relation to the slide projection to their right, a movie image of Mel Gibson holding a gun to someone’s head, they seem alien. Even though space may sometimes appear to be the only truly foreign place left (as for the space travelling version of Gulliver: Dave Lister), the simple processes of life in a foreign country are more strange than this generic image from American popular culture, despite it being a violent scenario of a man clearly in distress.

Olivia Plender

An excerpt from the essay by Olivia Plender, published in the exhibition catalogue discourski!, Galeria Arsenał, Białystok 2002