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Zbigniew Libera: The first thing I’d like to ask you is how you define yourself, who you really are – a painter, a photographer, or perhaps something else still?
Wojciech Gilewicz: In what I do I try precisely to defy such categories, this labelling, this pigeonholing. I’m a painter, I use the classic medium, but I use it in a perverse way – I want my paintings to be invisible and thus contradict the genre as a whole. To contradict it, on the one hand, while, on the other, showing its triumph. What interests me the most in what I do is arriving at the situation when something is at the two opposite ends of the value scale at the same time, e.g. a painting that represents a certain specific fragment of reality is removed from this reality and becomes an abstract painting. It’s the same with what you’re asking about. I fell an artist, but what I do, what I practice, isn’t of such importance to me; it doesn’t matter to me whether I’m painting or taking photographs, who knows what I’ll be doing a year from now? I can’t say I feel a photographer – I simply use the medium. But is it so important, after all, whom I feel?
ZL: It didn’t ask the question by accident. It seems to me one can be a painter without practicing painting. What I mean is consciousness – its core. There are photographers who could be practicing painting. How would you define your consciousness?
WG: To start from the beginning – I have a degree in painting. My photographic practice was initially very much painting-related, supporting it, documenting, entering into a relationship with it. In Them, painting is, in theory, absent, but a painter will always think like a painter, even if only in terms of colour. I’m not interested in black-and-white photography, nor in the photographic process as such – I have my prints made at a commercial studio. I think in terms of colour and composition, and even when I want to contradict those, they will be present anyway.
ZL: So you’re a painter. Where did you study, with whom?
WG: I started in Poznań, because the academy there was reputed at the time as being more liberal and open-minded. I spent two years there. In my third year, I moved to Warsaw, to the studio of Leon Tarasewicz, and it’s under his supervision that I obtained the degree.
ZL: So you’ve received proper education as a painter. You define your consciousness as that of a painter. How, therefore, did you arrive at the photographic project Them?
WG: Early on, I decided not to paint people. I stopped making portraits, self-portraits, etc. Instead, my paintings were conceptual reflections on, for instance, the landscape or the cityscape. At some point, however, I felt that work missed the personal, emotional element. I’ve long been involved in photography but my photography was also devoid of people. My diploma project, for instance, was about the relationships between photography and painting. I felt the lack of people in my works, and, having decided to start photographing people, I thought I’d be the best model myself. The dual-image-filter and double-exposition technique that I use is very precise and the solution didn’t occur to me at once. It took a year of experimenting, perfecting it.
ZL: Do you know other artists who’ve used the technique?
WG: Many artists have multiplied themselves: Katarzyna Górna or Paweł Zak in Poland, Anthony Goicolea when you think of international artists.
ZL: But you can multiply yourself in Photoshop. I’m asking whether you know anyone who uses the double-image-filter and double-exposition technique.
WG: Well, you’re right: Goicolea certainly used Photoshop. As for Górna and Żak – I don’t know. It’s hard to judge by simply looking at the picture. In fact, I know of no other artist who uses an SLR camera and the double-image filter.
ZL: There’s a huge difference between Photoshop and the double-image filter. It also needs to be added that these aren’t digital pictures but the ‘ancient’ technique of celluloid film.
WG: Technique matters a lot to me. I always use the most basic, classic technique. In photography, it’s an SLR camera and the dual-image filter. The same is true for my painting – when I paint, it’s oil on canvas, and it is precisely on the basis of this very basic technique that I transgress the painting medium. Sometimes, it’d perhaps be easier for me to paint something using, say, bituminous paste, and yet I don’t do it.
ZL: I think the use of the traditional photographic medium and the dual-image filter are a very important aspect of what you do.
WG: It’s true, and the choice of technique has some fundamental consequences for the pictures themselves. When you use the dual-image filter, you have a dark vertical strip running across the middle of each picture. There’s no possibility for the characters to have any physical relationship, for them to touch or greet each other. So, on the one hand, the medium limits you, while, on the other, introducing a very interesting element. It’s a kind of ‘remote closeness’, a closeness that both is there and isn’t, because the subjects will in fact never meet.
ZL: You’ve defined yourself as a painter and yet you deeply penetrate the world of photography, and that using a traditional technique. In photography, which until recently wasn’t recognised as art at all, we have two clear trends today: one is recording photography, rooted in the photojournalism of Cartier Bresson or Robert Capa. Millions of snapshots are made, we now even have camera-equipped mobile phones. Tourists roaming the world with their cameras ‘ready to shoot’ have finished this kind of photography for art. On the other hand, there’s reproductive photography. Artists who say: all the photographs that interest us are already there, you only have to find the right one and ‘retake’ it. This genre also includes the photography of buildings or monuments, as it kind of reproduces them. How would you describe your photographs in the context of the two photographic genres practiced today – recording photography and reproductive photography?
WG: I don’t agree with the notion that all pictures have already been taken. Painting had been pronounced dead too, and there’ve been so many returns to it since, e.g. Gerhard Richter. According to your classification, my photography fits rather in the recording slot, though one could argue with that, because there’s a lot of mise-en-scène in it. On the other hand, the series is very much autobiographic.
ZL: Your photography is staged photography. This is rather typical in the situation in which recording photography has found itself today. The only solution, it seems, is mise-en-scène, e.g. Jeff Wall. So your photography is recording photography, though we know it’s also staged photography to some degree. What I’m interested in is the role of chance in your pictures, how much you rely on chance, or do you try to eliminate it altogether?
WG: This series is very intuitive. I do many things on the spur of the moment, and yet they work. For instance, I take pictures by the big red flower that has blossomed in my mother’s house. I perceive it like a painter, as a red blotch, as form, colour. I don’t attribute any symbolic meanings to it, though. They arise themselves when you view the picture later.
ZL: So let’s talk about the places where these pictures are taken. What kind of places are these, and why these and not other?
WG: For a couple of years now I’ve been spending half a year in Poland and half a year in the US. So I live a split existence. The rhythm of my life in the US is completely different than here. The places when I live or stay are many: my sister’s apartment, my mother’s house, an empty corridor in the apartment block… These are great sceneries, absolutely authentic.
ZL: So the places are part of your biography.
WG: Yes, the whole series is closely connected with my life, and however I try to deny it, it’s clear that these are my self-portraits. You can arrange them this way or that way, you can also arrange them chronologically and they will form a narrative.
ZL: Besides places, we also have staged scenes here. What are your motivations in inventing them? Why these scenes and not other? For instance, the doctor’s room scene – why is it here?
WG: The doctor’s room has always been a strange place for me – on the one hand, somewhat oppressive, on the other, somewhat erotic… The atmosphere of the room where my father received patients – he’s a neurologist – always seemed ambiguous to me. One person undresses and the other examines them. The tension that arises in the process, the relationship that emerges…
ZL: Does this mean that you’re looking for situations that will build tension, stir up emotions?
WG: Tension, emotions, yes… but always with the assumption that I am both characters, and that the whole situation is staged and has never happened. It’s the same case as with my painting. It doesn’t exist unless you’re told where it is. You’ll walk, unawares, over a painting pretending to be a flagstone, you’ll sit on a canvas that forms part of a balustrade and you won’t notice anything either. This has happened many times and several paintings were actually ruined this way. So this is classic painting, a classic medium, the artist paints spending a lot of time, often in the open air, he produces a classic picture, which, however, is invisible, as if it didn’t exist. An extreme situation – is this the triumph of painting or its negation?
ZL: So this way we’ve identified a close affinity between your photographs and your painting works.
WG: For a long time, I perceived my painting practice and Them as two separate things. At some point, however, I realised there were many similarities between them, for instance, in the approach to the medium itself.
ZL: I’d like to ask you now about the relationship between the private and the public. These photographs show privacy, but they always do so in a public context. You show highly intimate images, sometimes shockingly so. We know these are staged scenes, but the choice of places and scenes is provocative. It looks a bit like exhibitionism, or a play with exhibitionism.
WG: Certainly. I have no problem with that, because, viewing these pictures, I distance myself from them, I see I’m playing a role here.
ZL: So it’s not you?
WG: Well, this is the tough question: whether the narrator and the author are the same person…
ZL: But you give them your face, your body… Is it so that you’re playing a role here, or rather that they part of you?
WG: Of course they’re part of me, and all this is very autobiographic, but at the same time I’m playing a role; even if I was playing myself, it’d still be playing a role. For instance, when I took the picture of me crying, it was authentic, but at the same time it was staged – I was really crying, but aware of the camera in front of me, which somewhat undermined the authenticity of the situation.
ZL: So you’re not only a photographer but also an actor and a director.
WG: That’s right, I only used an assistant on one or two occasions. I play all the roles here. To return to your previous question – when I wanted to show these pictures for the first time, I thought of showing them in small format, like your ordinary family-album photos.
ZL: This immediately suggests itself, in fact, when you’ve brought these photos here, you’ve brought them in small format, as if they were family photos. If we’ve arrived at this point, I’d like to ask you how you imagine the possible interpretations of your photographs?
WG: I haven’t heard an interpretation yet that would satisfy me fully. Two things, I’d say: autobiography, and corporeality. I’d also like to hear a psychological interpretation, even from someone completely unconnected with art.
ZL: Like Doctor Freud?
WG: Not necessarily Doctor Freud, but a good contemporary psychoanalyst.
ZL: So are there photographs a sort of autotherapy?
WG: They are. Besides, when you photograph a situation, you make it familiar. Visualising something makes it familiar.
ZL: That’s very interesting, I didn’t think about it this way. It’s great I know it now.
WG: There’s the gay interpretation, there’s the family-album interpretation, but to view these pictures as a document, a recording of certain mental states, and to have them interpreted in this vein by a person unconnected with art, would be extremely interesting for me.
ZL: This thread has intrigued me. I didn’t expect a therapeutic aspect. So you expect an outsider, a therapist, to take a look at you by viewing these pictures, to make you aware of things you don’t know yourself because you’re entangled in them. It seems to me that precisely this schema is already present here. Making a picture of you two, you situate yourself outside and you are the third one. It’s as if you were looking at yourself. The therapist is you.
WG: It’s possible. In fact, I think I could work out each picture, evoke the emotions, explain why the given picture was made precisely when it was made. Only I don’t know whether I’d be able to draw any conclusions from that. That’s what I’d need the third person for. That’s why such a psychological interpretation would be so interesting.
ZL: Perhaps psychological, perhaps not. I can also imagine other possible interpretations, not necessarily psychological per se, but semi-psychological. For instance, I clearly see the image of your self emerging here. The majority of religious and mystical systems believe that man is made up by three parts, and so is God. And here you are obviously three – the two of you in the photograph, and the third one taking the picture. Sometimes there’s also a fourth one in the photograph. How would you explain their presence, are they here as objects, as part of the scenery, or do you treat them as persons, and if so, what is the significance of that?
WG: They introduce further confusion, complicate the whole situation. Like, for instance, in this picture with the photographer – my cousin, who is taking a picture of me in a studio. Who is the photographer here and who is the viewer, who is looking and who is being looked at…?
ZL: But don’t you objectify these persons? Because if you objectify yourself, no one will bear a grudge, but if you objectify someone else, someone from outside your circle, then it’s a different story.
WG: Objectify? I think that’s too strong a word. I simply use them, I need them for something. The series keeps developing. At a certain point, the third character simply came into play.
ZL: Speaking of which, how long have you been working on these series now? How long did it take you to make these fifty pictures?
WG: I’ve been working on the series since 2002. One session takes three to four hours. The dual-image filter technique requires great precision, tiptoeing, the camera has to stand absolutely still, it mustn’t move a millimetre. It’s a very precise instrument, based on the eye and on intuition.
ZL: I’d like now to move to questions of a more delicate nature. There is a clear suggestion of eroticism in these pictures. If I saw them, and didn’t know you, I’d think their author was a third gender – neither heterosexual, nor gay, but rather someone like Genet, a gay who imagines. Am I right or am I wrong?
WG: If there’s a suggestion of the sexual act in the picture, then, for me, it’s the closest relationship that is possible between two people, and yet you have to remember all the time about the technique used here, that is, the fact that this act could never have taken place. My intention is for these photographs to be ambiguous, for instance, the picture with the table – it may about a sexual act, but it may be about moving a table across the room.
ZL: Could these photos be shown in a gay art exhibition?
WG: Yes, sure. The motif of auto-eroticism, of examining yourself in a mirror, is surely present in these pictures, but, above all, you have two men here. And yet they’re always separated by that impassable borderline.
ZL: There’s also the mythical story of Narcissus who suffered because he was separate from his own reflection in water. You can say that these pictures are a contemporary illustration of the Narcissus myth.
WG: I guess so, but was Narcissus gay? Not necessarily so.
ZL: Not necessarily so. That’s why I mentioned a third sex, a third possibility. It seems to be an important aspect of these works.
WG: It is. In fact, the gay interpretation doesn’t satisfy me completely, it reduces the whole thing…
ZL: Or goes one step too far.
WG: Yes, you’re right. I’ll tell you one more thing – my father likes these pictures very much.
ZL: I was just about to ask you whether you had shown these pictures to your family members.
WG: Sure, my mother likes them very much too. It’s important for me that my father sees a relationship between these two persons in the photos, not necessarily an intimate relationship, but simply a relationship.
ZL: And your sister?
WG: My sister won’t comment, though very many of the sessions took place in her apartment. My mother, though, suggested something to me: she believes these serious pictures lack an element of humour. This made me think. It seems to me that a humorous approach would relieve the erotic tension, shift emphasis elsewhere.
ZL: For me, many of these pictures are funny, like the one where one of you is sitting on the toilet and the other opens the door. When was it made?
WG: It’s one of the earliest ones.
ZL: Do you intend to continue the series?
WG: I do, with varying intensity, there are periods when I make no photos at all.
ZL: Do you know the direction in which the series will develop?
WG: I’m currently fascinated with yoga, the idea of working with your body. Very ascetic, monochromatic pictures, in which one of the characters does some incredible things with his body. Besides, there’s the question of the two characters finally meeting physically.
ZL: So you’d like to break through this invisible wall?
WG: Yes, I think it’s possible.
ZL: And what do you think about the interpretation proposed by Karol Sienkiewicz, which is featured in your catalogue?
WG: It came as a positive surprise to me. The work is indeed a kind of private documentation.
ZL: There’s one motif in this interpretation that sounds tragically – that the characters will never meet, will never be able to touch each other. I have the impression that this limitation can be overcome. It doesn’t seem to me that these characters don’t meet – they meet, for instance, by looking at each other.
WG: And what if I found my double? I’ve now found someone who’s built very similarly to me, and I’d like to use it.
ZL: The pictures show that you had long hair and in one photo you actually cut them. Why did you cut your hair?
WG: It marked the end of a certain period. With that gesture, I closed a big chapter in the making of these pictures. I prepared for a long time for the hair-cutting photo. I had been growing my hair for five years, and the picture could not be retaken.
ZL: It is also characteristic of these photographs, at least I get the impression, that they don’t contain references to other pictures, to the history of art. Am I right?
WG: I certainly feel an affinity with the works of Cindy Sherman or Nan Goldin. Nan Goldin’s pictures are sometimes virtually pornographic, and yet they also communicate the quintessence of love. I feel an affinity with her projects because she follows the same characters for many years, she is close with them.
ZL: When looking at the hair-cutting picture, I am, in turn, reminded of Frida Kahlo’s haircut self-portrait. Tell me about other artists who’ve inspired you.
WG: When I started working on this series, I happened upon a catalogue of Anthony Goicolea’s work. It made an incredible impression on me.
ZL: It is a frequent practice in art, in photography, for the artist to exploit his own person. The way you do it, however, is different from all other artists that come to my mind. This suggests another question: how important is the formal aspect for you in these pictures?
WG: I’d rather that it wasn’t important, but it turns out to be very important. You can’t escape it. I also have to admit that Photoshop tempts me at times.
ZL: You shouldn’t use it, though. And it’s not only a matter of artistic ethics. If you don’t use Photoshop, if you make the pictures this and not another way, it adds realism to the whole thing…
WG: How would you classify it anyway? It’s not photomontage. The final material is an evenly exposed negative. Would you call it trick photography?
ZL: It doesn’t matter how you call it, you’re not pursuing formal innovation here, that’s not the point.
