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Following years of devastation and omnipresent entropy, a wave of revitalisations has now risen in Poland. The theoretically long-term and comprehensive programmes usually produce only superficial results, devoid of any fundamental reflection on the crux of the matter. While definitely favourable in terms of improving the overall aesthetics, these processes also have other consequences, noticed only by few. The individual history and unique specificity of places are erased so that mock-up cities can be built, full of standard elevations and banal sett pavements. Next to the main thoroughfares, right behind their rows of renovated façades, there stretches a parallel reality of ever more run-down courtyards and backstreets. Besides, the changes usually concentrate in city centres, circumventing the peripheries, which, usually forgotten and marginalised in the zoning plans, need them more than any other part of town.
Wojciech Gilewicz entered the great construction site that Sanok is today with his own artistic proposal. He decided to repair with his paintings the most squalid and neglected fragments of the urban tissue, and thus to revitalise, artistically, areas that are usually no-go. He decided to employ painting in a purely utilitarian activity. His interventions encompassed the Okęcie area, that is, a commuter bus station, where he repaired a fence falling apart under the weight of advertising billboards; an urine-reeking gateway where he renovated an urine-corroded wall; and a side street with a façade covered by layers of peeling off paint. At the bus station, he placed white canvas screens which reintroduced long-lost order, and their intriguing emptiness was to serve as inspiration for the passers-by, used to being assaulted with chaotic visual information. In the gateway and the side street, the artist mounted monochromatic pictures with lively textures, as well as filling small holes in the wall with irregularly-shaped pictures. He also performed smaller repairs, adding missing wall tiles, a ventilation grate, and broken flower stands. The result were highly diverse paintings: from large-format uniform surfaces, to small, virtually organic forms whose shape was determined by the limits of the given space. The works were left in public space so that they were interacted with by the passers-by and the weather, and so that they eventually blended fully with the place in which they had been installed.
The Revitalisations project, more than any of Gilewicz’s previous actions, exposes the utopian nature of artistic interventions. It also represents an important statement on the, noticeable recently, mythologisation of public space and the mass viewer, whose most common reaction to artistic projects, as Gilewicz’s realisation emphatically proved, is passive indifference, or vandalisation. The project, its author claims, was doomed to fail from the very beginning. A radically abstract picture will never respond to the man in the street’s either existential or aesthetical needs. In Sanok, the artist’s actions met with instant reaction. Very often he felt like an intruder, harassed by winos or hooligans, and a picture left unattended for a moment he often found destroyed. After a couple of days he started working early in the morning, and started to have second thoughts about using the most successful pictures lest they be stolen or vandalised. What happened to the works placed in public space exposes most emphatically the condition of the accidental viewer. The artist’s actions were clearly incomprehensible for him, and the works themselves – devoid of any aesthetical value. A monochromatic painting that, in the gallery, proves highly problematic for an uneducated audience, in the urban space was not recognised as a work of art at all. Gilewicz’s works disappointed from the very beginning. When, asked by a lady in the side street what he was doing there, he replied, truthfully, that he was painting a fragment of the wall on canvas, he heard ‘… and I thought you were an artist’. Another time a group of people returned to the gallery asking whether the whole thing was really about ‘these colour rectangles’. The white surface of the bus-station fence didn’t even attract any graffiti writers, and it was only after two months that the stalemate was overcome by a far-right group that pasted ideological posters all over it. Soon other notices appeared, and the fence slowly returned to its former function. Gilewicz had to take care of artistically processing this old-new situation himself, but the painting collages he produced would disappear on the very same day under new layers of ads and posters. Perhaps no one felt the addressee of the intervention, because Okęcie is a no-man’s land, visited chiefly by suburbanites, and seldom by the city dwellers. The pictures in the gateway also adopted the function of the place and became a rather original urinal. Though, in this case, some locals noticed the difference and were actually happy that someone had thought about the stinking gate and mounted special protective covers. The corner in the side street was noticed and empirically examined, after only a week the canvas was torn in half. Both corners from the very start stood out artificially with their ‘newness’ against the wall’s façade, fitting with the makeshift nature of superficial renovations. Now, paradoxically, and against the author’s intentions, the work actually enhanced the sense of general disorder. These struggles with the inadequacy of the medium inspired Gilewicz to abandon the canvas on behalf of working directly on building walls. This is how the idea was conceived of a mural that, instead of covering the defects, would actually highlight them. It would, perversely, respond to the residents’ real needs, offering them a vision of the total destruction that, in spite of all appearances, they accept and strive for in their reactions. For the side street’s residents, the sight of the naturally dilapidating wall had over the years become familiar and predictable, unlike the artist’s unconventional and unpredictable actions. That’s why the realisation never took place, even at the price of renovating the wall. The officials weren’t helpful either, too busy monitoring the big, official revitalisations.
A similar project in Wrocław proved a major success. The paintings survived over a year, and changes in their structure represented authentic dialogue. In this context, it is interesting how would the Wrocław project have fared if it had been located in a less central part of the city, and if the viewers were ordinary people rather than a gallery-frequenting artistic milieu that entered in a dialogue with the pictures. Perhaps the difference between the two projects consists in the difference between Sanok and Wrocław, and between the two locations. In Sanok, Gilewicz entered areas that are no-go for the stately burghers or tourists, places where members of the underclass spend their time drinking or leaning out of the window, watching their stretch of the street, the only territory they have any influence on. Such places have completely different dynamics than a crowded historical old town that the residents and tourists are unable to fully take in or monitor. What remains is the question whether indifference towards, and the negation of, artistic interventions are characteristic for the provinces, or whether it’s an overall trend that was simply highlighted on the Sanok’s micro-scale.
