The Cross

The multimedia sculpture by Piotr Wysocki, both in its narrative as well as in terms of its formal aspects, presents a Chinese box-like composition. It is a story within a story, a vision of an amateur filmmaker to which Wysocki assigned a symbolic meaning. The Cross is the outcome of the collaboration of the artist with Mieczysław Zieliński, a patriot and a former boy scout, who for many years has been filming masses and state celebrations. Wysocki and Zieliński (who was 78 at the time) met coincidentally by the Presidential Palace in Warsaw in 2010 when they were both documenting the mourning of those who had died in the Smolensk crash of the Polish plane carrying a state delegation. The two men then went together to Krakow to attend the funeral of the presidential couple, Maria and Lech Kaczyński.

The construction of the work, made up of 15 TV screens built in minimalist metal modules, is a reference to the cross which was spontaneously brought and mounted in the street of Krakowskie Przedmieście during the vigil after the disaster. Each of the screens displays different video material. The footage of the solemn silence following the catastrophe, and the visually corresponding masses of candles covering the street, is intertwined with shots showing the funeral of the presidential couple and the disgraceful events which entailed – the so-called “battle for the cross”. Wysocki shows Zieliński’s masterfully captured spectrum of social mood and behavior. Apart from people lost in prayer and scouts with national banners, we also see fanatics blindly devout to the ideologies they follow. The somberness and dignity of the funeral procession is tainted with an overlapping rhetoric of hatred: nationalism and ultra-Catholicism, anti-government, anti-Semitic and anti-Russian slogans and chants. The fifteen parallel and mutually overlapping records are very reflective of the ideological conflicts and break-up of society.

Wysocki shows the mourning from the perspective of an engaged participant. The cross, which encompasses the projections, does not eliminate the so commonly present aggression, nor does it distance the viewer from the events recorded. It does, however, allow for a certain perspective of the viewed footage. The joint work of Wysocki and Zieliński is a picture about an individual, and about a mob, about religiousness, and about the entanglement in fanaticism, politics, and the wrongly understood patriotism.

Izabela Kopania

The text was published in the book I. Kopania „Open Set. Works from Kolekcja II of Galeria Arsenał in Białystok and Podlaskie Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych”, Białystok 2012