The Sewer

The comment: “It is easier to believe that someone has dug a passage hundreds of metres down than that it is an illusion”, which Leszek Lewandowski’s The Sewer has drawn, correctly describes the situation of a viewer confronted with this artist’s output. For nearly three decades Lewandowski has been exploring the issues of optical illusions and the determinants of human perception. His interest in optics, quantum theory and epistemology is transformed into objects and installations that draw the viewers in. Making use of lamps and mirrors, he puts the viewers into the state of disorientation and plays with their senses, thereby demonstrating that the tools that allow a human being to function in the world are fallible.

The Sewer is a concrete circle pit block half a metre high, inside which Lewandowski placed horizontal mirrors; in its walls he mounted an industrial lamp and a metal handle. Due to the arrangement of the mirrors, whoever looks inside sees what appears to be an interior of a deep well, into which one could descend. The work was prepared for the Poland – Germany 4:6 exhibition (BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Katowice, 2009). Being shown in this context, it brings to mind associations with the uneasy relations between the two countries. The title automatically suggests the Warsaw Uprising and the testimonies of its participants. Other images focused on the events of August 1944, for instance Andrzej Wajda’s film Kanał, inevitably enter the orbit of Lewandowski’s work. Lewandowski does not make pronouncements on historical issues; he practically refrains from commenting. Yet by showing the ease with which human perception, and thus also cognition, are deceived he seems to remind us that history is just as easy to manipulate. Commenting on this work, he said: “Correctness can be political, and art should be free of such limitations”.

Speaking of the areas of his inspiration, Lewandowski pointed to the writings of Jacques Derrida and the neologism différance which the philosopher had coined and which he did not want to describe in the categories of either a concept or a word. According to Derrida, words do not refer directly to what they are supposed to signify; their meaning can be captured through other words, which nevertheless have the same limitations. The process of naming or understanding is infinite. Another, slightly perverse cluster of meanings embedded in Lewandowski’s objects, which are often constructed strictly in keeping with the rules of science, point to the postmodernist uncertainty as to the possibility of cognition, the conception of reality as a construct created by the human brain.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz