The Graduate

The Graduate by Andrzej Pepłoński, which evinces manifold formal and iconographic affinities with the works of Andy Warhol, is constructed of thirty painterly interpretations of shots from Mike Nichols’ film under the same title (The Graduate, 1967). Repetitions of the face of Dustin Hoffman, who played the main protagonist of the film, give the work its expressive power and concurrently constitute the key to its understanding. Links with pop-art, noticed by critics in Pepłoński’s early works (i.e. dating from the 1980s and early 1990s), seem to be based on relations less superficial than the use of the characteristic multiplication of motifs derived from the rich stock of pop-culture and the visual archives of the media.

Repetition used in The Graduate is not a simple compositional device; neither was it that in the case of the multiplied images of Marilyn Monroe or Jackie Kennedy. This device may be interpreted in terms of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and his concept of the Real. The Real, according to Lacan, is not the same as the real, existing in the order of the language. To generalize, the real begins to exist for a subject in the moment when that subject undertakes the first attempts to use speech. Whatever was before speech, before the order of the language, is, in Lacan’s interpretation, the Real. It is inexpressible and impossible to capture, and all that is said only revolves around it. Obsessive repetition may be understood as an attempt to approach the Real, as well as an endeavour to integrate the subject.

Pepłoński’s graduate has a shattered personality. Problems with identity, in the individual as much as in the social aspect, are indirectly suggested by the analogy to the protagonist of the film by Nichols. Creating the image of the Graduate is for some reason impossible; hence Pepłoński resorts to the multiple portrait. His works have been interpreted in terms of entropy, the “absence of subject” and attempts to construct its coherent vision through, for instance, showing it from multiple angles. A feeling of the absence of the subject/object and the problems with expressing it have also been commented upon by the artist himself: “Generally, my preferred strategy is quotation as a principle. I trust in things that already exist, since this is the best method to prove the veracity and realness of the world […]”. Quotation alone, however, seems no longer enough, and the (already existing) real turns out to be as unapproachable as Lacan’s Real.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz