GOOD NIGHT AND BAD LUCK

Project co-organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polish Year in Israel 2008/2009. Project financed from the means of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland.
www.poland-israel.org

Organization of the exhibition:
Artists’ House, Tel Aviv, Israel
Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok, Poland

Cooperation:
Embassy of Israel, Warsaw, Poland

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On Fear, Selfness and Contingency: Contemplations on the artworks
of Liliana Orbach, Vered Nissim and Noa Sadka
By Dr. Ketzia Alon

Three female Israeli artists and three male Polish artists are taking part in this exhibition. How should we relate to these “biological” coincidental (or not so) facts? Should these facts “influence” the artists’ creations? Should these facts be reflected in their works? What kind of relationship should the work of art generate within this “Israeli-Polish relations, 2008” geopolitical, constructed frame? Liliana Orbach, Vered Nissim and Noa Sadka expose their distinct subjective attitudes while facing this matrix of international relations, and, at the same time, each one presents a completely autonomous thought, chained directly to their prior body of works and shaped before the implicit thematic character of this exhibition was conceived. […]
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Good Night and Bad Luck
By MW

The legendary American broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow always ended his TV show in the same way. Enwrapped in a cloud of cigarette smoke, he addressed his audience with the words: “Good night and good luck.” In the 1950s – an era of black and white television where the host of TV programs could publicly smoke one cigarette after another, an era in the shadow of a cold war threatening total nuclear annihilation – this farewell might have sounded like Lucifer’s ironic mockery. In his famous shows, Murrow cracked down on the recklessness of the psychosis of fear and suspicions unleashed by Senator McCarthy. This obsession was transformed in popular cinematography into science fiction movies about alien invasion, a war of the worlds, the night of the living dead. The most moving movies were those that showed how aliens entered imperceptibly into our bodies, how they controlled our thoughts, so that even one’s own father or mother could suddenly become a source of deadly danger. Switching off their TV sets, with the wish of a goodnight and good luck, they dreamt of the misfortune whose shapeless shadow lurked around every corner. When Paul Virilio wrote that television was the contemporary battlefield, he had before his eyes the disaster of the Chernobyl power station and the Twin Towers in New York. According to the author of “Art and Fear,” the analysis of an accident should be perceived as logical art, pure art. To invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck, to invent the car is to invent the road accident, to invent the space shuttle is to invent its explosion. Sudden, unexpected stock-market crashes, nationwide catastrophes in our financial systems form an absolutely tangible reality of the present day. Naomi Klein in her latest book, “The Shock Doctrine,” describes how chaos, natural and social disasters are used to disorient public opinion and limit civil rights. The madness of imagination, the return of neurotic romanticism hidden behind the façade of a rational era of science, wealth and progress is reflected perfectly in the intuitions of art. We can try to describe how artists move around a landscape sketched out so using the words of Julia Kristeva in “Powers of Horror,” “Instead of sounding himself as to his “being,” he does so concerning his place: “Where am I?” instead of “Who am I?” For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines – for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject – constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray. He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding. He has a sense of the danger, of the loss that the pseudo-object attracting him represents for him, but he cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart. And the more he strays, the more he is saved.”

One can infer from this that the artist is excluded because he asks questions. The artist touches upon a space that can be neither comprehended nor named, its confines are fluid and indefinite. He is the one on the night journey, who paradoxically the more he strays, the more he seems to be saved. As Jean Baudrillard writes in his essay “The Intelligence of Evil,” it is devoid of objective reality, we are not dealing with a perceivable object, but with a form that perceives us. In another essay, “The Transparency of Evil,” Baudrillard writes that the degree to which AIDS, terrorism, crack cocaine or computer viruses mobilize the popular imagination should tell us that they are more than anecdotal occurrences in an irrational world. The fact is that they contain within them the whole logic of our system: these events are merely the spectacular expression of that system.

One of the means of this expression is the return to the concept of “the gothic” in art. This Victorian, romantic and decadent style in a surprising way settles perfectly into the sensitivity of artists at the turn of the 21st century. It blends an equal degree of both horror and the grotesque. It’s an atmosphere where the esthetics of punk meet surrealism. It is a reaction against attempts to bring rational or political order to art. Hence, it easily mixes many contradictions. One could ask, why the gothic now? Gilda Williams, in the introduction to a book she edited on this phenomenon, points to the emergence of a generation of artists contesting the canons created in the sixties, which returned in the nineties in the form of neoconceptual art. The gothic returns as a handy descriptive concept in an era which, similarly to the end of the 18th century, is a time of crisis and a turning point. Not accidentally “cultural vampirism” has become one of the more catchy definitions over the past years.

One of the symptoms of crisis are tremendously popular conspiracy theories. Their multi-plot threads are used by Hubert Czerepok in his work. He is interested in the revelations of saints, visits of extraterrestrials, esoteric sources of Nazism, conspiracies of big corporations, exorcisms and any other possible sources of the inexplicable chaos in our world. The Internet is the source from which Czerepok draws his apocalyptic knowledge. This storage site of everything does not differentiate between the reports of the Nobel Prize winners and a bulletin announcing the imminent end of the world. The image that emerges from this art is unclear, mysterious and blurred. It will not tell us what the artist thinks about the objects he presents. It leaves us in uncertainty, could the world be in the hands of madmen? Are we being manipulated by aliens from outer space? In one of his works, Czerepok became interested in the curse put by the Pope in the Middle Ages on the town of Bytom, where the townspeople drowned two priests. The video “Possesion” is a typical example of the strategies employed by the artist. The undefined visual material comes from the infinite resources of the Internet. We don’t know but we can guess what it represents. The sounds are a recording of an alleged possession. We do not know and will probably never find out whether the recording is authentic. Keeping in mind that Czerepok not only mixes fiction and facts but also adds his own tales to fiction, we can only succumb to his gloomy fantasies.
In his paintings linked with video-projections, Dominik Lejman attempts to set a trap for the spectator’s perception. Looking at the painting we somehow become a significant element of a system generating meanings. In some of his works, the spectators are simply pulled inside; in others they remain outside but are still forced to define their position in reference to what they see. Such is the case in his works “Breathe Deeply (Air Conditional Interior)” and “Status (1 hr with time-code)”. Both present a dead body filmed in the morgue, both are accompanied by a strip at the bottom of the screen where a clock counts down sixty minutes. As the author says, this is a terrifying time code, because it applies to each one of us. It does not measure the passage of time for the dead body, but for our bodies which will be dead. In his new work, Lejman refers to the poetics of horror, which he combines with a sophisticated painterly distance. “Trap” shows an escape through a dark corridor. The black tunnel, with a light at the end, is a trap into which the audience is immerged. As Louise Bourgeois claims, art is the experiencing of trauma.

The works of Marek Wasilewski often make use of found footage technology or pretend to be it. Sometimes it’s impossible to say whether the material we see is original, since the artist borrows from himself, copying or refilming his own materials. This unclear nature is characteristic of a series of photographs entitled “Good night.” The photographs of parts of a female body protruding from under the sheets, taken in darkness with the use of a flashbulb look as if they came from police records. They show the ambiguous status of photography as a medium that provides evidence. These photographs combine the passionless reporter’s registration with the dramatic nature of gloomy narrations and painterly blur. Paradoxically they are ambiguous, terrible and disturbing. Suspended between affectation and fact, death and dream they leave us in an irremovable uncertainty of what had happened.
“Of course, there is art. A bomb in the National Gallery would make some noise. But it would not be serious enough. Art has never been their fetish. It’s like breaking a few back windows in a man’s house; whereas, if you want to make him really sit up, you must try at least to raise the roof. There would be some screaming of course, but from whom? Artists – art critics and such like – people of no account. Nobody minds what they say,” says agent provocateur Vladimir in Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent.” Perhaps art is of no importance. However, sometimes it is a secret agent as well as a provocation and a provocateur. An unclear scent of the dream we will dream after someone has told us: Good night and good luck.

translated from Polish by Beata Szczypińska

the text published in the exhibition catalogue „GOOD NIGHT AND BAD LUCK”,
Galeria Arsenal, Bialystok 2009