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Traces of Representation/ Directing the Moment
by Dorota Sajewska
I who am him and he who is me; I with my eyes lovingly fixed on myself; I admiring my own image in the mirror – that could seem to be the leitmotif of Wojciech Gilewicz’s photographic series, Them. The Narcissus myth, so strongly rooted in European culture, is too obvious here however, too blatant, for us to believe that self-love, or rather the love of one’s image reflected in another person, is to be the main theme here. That it is supposed to invest these pictures with meaning and significance. When we penetrate beneath the surface of the mirror images of oneself, beneath the appearance of subtle loving idealisation, we may encounter not so much the Other as rather a shadow cast on a very fragile self; a subject unable to communicate and symbolise, yet still searching for a communicative form of expression for its body. This hidden face of Narcissus in Gilewicz’s photographs is melancholy.
‘ What is behind the melancholic gaze is a subject that looks at people and things as if at himself: as at an absence, a loss, something beyond his reach’, writes Marek Sobczyk, an expert on this particular form of existence. Consciously or not, Gilewicz’s self-portraits are almost exemplary in revealing the basic mechanism of melancholy: a tendency for often distorted representations of oneself, a bond with the lost or unfulfilled, a narcissistic absorption of the object of desire, which is also the object of loss, and finally making oneself its substitute. The melancholic’s love is filled with a dialectic of unity and separation, which is why in each of the pictures there is I and there is Him. ‘…in sadness the self is yet joined with the other, it carries it within, it introjects its own omnipotent projection – and joys in it’, writes the French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. The other is therefore not a real partner, but only a ‘false companion and distressed comforter’. He is not a real Other, but solely a quasi-object originating within the self and spat out of it. And as self-referential as the self. It is a projection designed to replace a missing language, a necessary plane of identification. The essence of drama, as we know, is a plot, action, collision, the agon.
This particular and constant projection of his body in the lookalike gemination enables the melancholic subject of Gilewicz’s pictures to overcome his own alienation. The whole theatrical staffage: the mask, the costume, the setting, the precisely staged situation are a kind of verbalisation. Self-eroticism, homosexuality, fetishism, exhibitionism all function here as a perverse shield against becoming silent, an armour protecting against the complete loss of identity. Through such heavily staged situations, filled with an ambivalent pleasure, loneliness is challenged for a moment. Yet the sexual tension between the characters in these pictures is of an ambiguous nature. On the one hand, it seems to be filling a void, but on the other, the play with sexuality never results in fulfilment, culmination, satiation. As if no staged situation, whether utterly innocent or most extreme, was able to satisfy. All pleasure is only potential here, announced, but never actually accomplished. It exists as a sensory trace of the representation.
The protagonist of the Them series is therefore stuck in a strange contradiction: while striving towards a meeting – dialogue? confrontation? – with the Other, he closes the only road connecting him with the world. He creates a safe and familiar intimate world in which even the other is himself – well-known and predictable. The whole macrocosm is reduced here to a clear-cut and spatially confined microcosm. As if he constantly had to keep his dissolving identity within bounds that can be measured, named, described, determined. The backgrounds of Gilewicz’s photographs are never abstract, but always real, material, identifiable: a living room, a bathroom, a doctor’s office, a restaurant, a subway station on Greenpoint Avenue, the bridge in front of the Eiffel Tower. The subject of these self-portraits – isolated, separated from the world, a prisoner of himself, living solely with his own mirror image – is unable to go beyond these bounds, as if he was afraid to take the risk. The confines of the space and situation create an irremovable foundation for his flickering self, while enabling transformations of his face and body that still do not create the risk of a complete loss of subjectivity.
In the neverending self-representation, the subject of these pictures blurs in the pulsation of presence and absence. Still, the changing images of oneself, the permanent distortions, deviations, metamorphoses and transformations always exude the same invariable sadness; whether this is Him or Me. A young, sometimes beautiful, man, in a strange reverie, distanced, his head slightly shifted, leaning on his arms, leaning against a wall, a bathtub, a bed, a bench, a chair, a table (as if the objects were supposed to protect him from being removed!), with a face that is virtually expressionless despite the many different stagings. Melancholy is ‘always, instantly, its own allegory’. The seriality of the pictures, arranged in any given manner – because it is one and the same body, one and the same face that create order out of the chaos and randomness of the situations – sends one and the same message: I, Wojciech Gilewicz, am an allegory of myself; I am the shades of my own subjectivity which has disintegrated into hundreds of grimaces, shapes, gestures, emotions that cannot be clearly defined. I am a sentimental lover; I am a gay; I am a pervert fucking on the table; I am a sad child dressing up as a clown, or a cheerful kid peeping on others in the bathroom; I am a good son, building a house and planting a tree (will I beget a son?); I am a son in the father’s office and the father examining his son; I am a tourist enamoured with Paris; a nomad in New York; ‘I am what I am; I am a nothing that hurts’.
Like a melancholic, Gilewicz wanders around the world, and he sees it in passing, in brief moments, in fleeting situations. One feels like saying that he gives his self away to the situations. That it is them that give him shape, bring out his emotions. And that he himself, like a documentary photographer, captures these moments with his camera, but without trying to get through the their essence, only sliding across their surface, falling out of one only to fall into another. But all this recording of casual and accidental events, the whole semblance of reality, ordinariness, everyday life is nothing but a precisely orchestrated show. Who knows Gilewicz in private is familiar with the ascetic and almost transparent greyness in which he clothes his body daily. Always a grey T-shirt, a grey sweater, a grey sweatshirt, grey trousers, grey shoes, grey eyes; always immaculately groom, with subtle gestures, delicates hands and face – here is the everyday mask of the author of the colour-sparkling pictures of the Them series. With this point of reference, one cannot but notice that the whole naturalism is simply a deliberate theatrical convention.
The purpose of the naturalistic convention has always been not so much to emphasise the materiality of the human body, to make the body (or its pathology) a value in itself, as, above all, to produce a reality effect, and therefore to give the recipient a sense of witnessing not so much an artistic fiction as ‘reality’ itself, as well as a sense of being part of the presented event. One needs to stress here the unique character of the mimetism typical for all naturalistic presentations. The reality effect evoked by them often betrays its second face, changing, paradoxically, into its own opposite, that is, an effect of strangeness. This is not, of course, because the artificialness of the stage signs and the theatricality of the presentation are exposed, but rather because of a dissonance with what the viewers are accustomed to. Patrice Pavis stresses that the ‘reality effect can be experienced when reality is represented in theatre in a manner consistent with the viewers’ accepted, that is, perceived as universal and natural, cultural norms or modes of viewing and understanding the world’. Elizabeth Burns writes in turn that the opposite of the process of evoking the reality effect in theatre is to perceive the theatricality of everyday life, that is, the peculiar ceremonies and rituals that ‘can suddenly manifest themselves as behavioural patterns that seem to have escaped their own brackets, unreal scenes in the very middle of reality, forcing us to re-examine that which is commonly regarded as ordinary (non-theatrical) behaviour’.
This is precisely how Wojciech Gilewicz uses the naturalistic convention in his staged self-portraits. He produces the effect of strangeness by confronting the viewer with a presentation almost as ‘authentic’ as reality itself. But the ‘authenticity’ in Gilewicz’s naturalistic theatre should be construed not as an adequacy between the represented and the representation, or between the imitating and the imitated, but rather as an actual exposition of that which is present, but has been repressed, forced into the unconscious. Playing a key role in this process is the physical dimension of human existence, present in these pictures above all as the biological, physiological body, a body desiring differently, unretouched, often imperfect. A body that, through its anti-canonical quality, protests the repressiveness of contemporary culture and its consumerist model of physicality. One can therefore venture to say that the allegorical narration of Gilewicz’s photographs, a collection of equivalent fragments, recordings and comments on intimately experienced moments, not only asks questions about the boundaries of one’s own self, but is also a kind of political manifesto.
The strength of Wojciech Gilewicz’s double self-portraits stems not only from the ambiguous status of the subject of these pictures, but also from the indeterminate and liminal nature of the language of his art, situated between photography and theatre. On the one hand, Them in a way contradicts the essence of photography, which is an absolutely individual existence. Gilewicz’s photographs, in turn, cannot be viewed in terms of individuality and specificity; their language is seriality. It is this multiplication of signs, polyphony of forms, performativity of the body that make up the full narrative relating the condition of the subject represented, or rather representing itself, here. And it is them that create the link with theatre. On the other hand, we must not forget that a theatre performance is never a permanent artefact; that it is ephemeral, momentary, even more: that its essence is exhausted in the present, in constant becoming and passing by. This fact however does not rule out the possibility that material objects appear in the show and are then left as such, becoming its traces. Its memory. This is precisely the nature of Gilewicz’s photographs. They are material artefacts that are remnants, remains, traces of the show that he subjects his own life to. These are fragments torn out of a continuum, pictures that may feature the actor’s body, a costume, a stage prop, but which never form a complete and cohesive narrative. They remain but recordings of a moment.
It is precisely the category of the moment that seems to constitute the basic link between the melancholic subject of these pictures and the languages in which it manifests itself. The main protagonist of Gilewicz’s photographs is the moment – the smallest unit of memory, experience, perception, representation. The moment when the change from one state to another occurs. Nothing corresponds to a liminal situation, an intermediate, border condition, more than the moment. Also in the moment temporal continuity is suspended, and the moment completely exhausts itself in the here and now. This means that when the moment is made present, it becomes an ecstatic experience for the subject experiencing it. And especially a melancholic subject: ‘…the alien, retarded, or vanishing speech of melancholy people leads them to live within a skewed sense of time. It does not pass by, the before/after notion does not rule it, does not direct it from a past toward a goal. Massive, weighty, doubtless traumatic because laden with too much sorrow or too much joy, a moment blocks the horizon of depressive temporality or rather removes any horizon, any perspective’.
The melancholic’s stage show is the possibility to separate oneself from the world, but also –by putting on a mask of irony, humour, perversion – from one’s own suffering. Melancholy is a state of pure immanence, of closing the road between the subject and the world through silence. Art however, which is always a language, creates a symbolic distance towards the unnameable and ambiguous, thus becoming the opposite of melancholy. Wojciech Gilewicz’s self-stagings, presented in the form of permanent traces – photographs – make it possible for communication to be restored between the melancholy subject and the world. And for a viewer different than the former to take place in the latter.
