WORKS Revitalisations 2 Obelisk Bat Yam 310 East 22nd Street Cuboids The Painters Untitled (gate) In Practice Shanghai Intrude New project Them KMS Zacheta Ivano-Frankivsk Revitalisations The Aporia of Painting Binary City TR Warszawa Galichnik Art Residency Foksal Gallery Fondation Deutsch de la Meurthe New York 2004 Unfinished project 1999 - Paintings 2000 - 2002 Seaside Plein-air City - Estate - Studio - Apartment Picture in the Field Biala Gallery Graduation project

by Karol Sienkiewicz

(…) nothing that is, insofar that it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody. Not Man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth. Hannah Arendt. 1

 

    Describing his work Family Album, Russian artist Aleksander Komarov notes that the invention of a cheap, small, and simple-to-use photo camera has created a new way of building family identity. The knowledge previously passed on verbally or in writing has now been replaced by light-sensitive images. ‘The family photo album is one of the most trivial things showing the portrayed history of the family, the closer and more distant relatives, connecting them all together’, Komarov writes. The album not only reflects relationships between people but, above all, serves as an instrument of forming personal narratives. ‘The idea of the family album is to bring together all kinds of visual material belonging to the given person, representing him or his family’.

    When, in 2005, Wojciech Gilewicz presented at the Warsaw Artists Action the photo series Them, the invitations came in the form of the series’ different photos developed in a photo lab on Kodak paper. Not leaflets printed at a print shop, but photographs that usually fill albums. In one of them, a man, sitting, naked, on the toilet seat, behind a door pushed open by his laughing twin brother, reaches out in a gesture of trying to stop the other man from releasing the shutter. Unsuccessfully. The camera records ever new episodes of the unfolding narrative.

    The majority of the pictures of the series, though they function chiefly as gallery-exhibited artefacts, depict scenes that could seem to be natural, captured in everyday life. More importantly, they capture places with which the author is or was personally connected – places where he lived or worked, streets that he trod, and, as a matter of exception, also people he stayed with. In a way, these photographs, though made using a special effect allowing the same person to be present twice in a single scene, arrange themselves into a kind of Gilewicz’s private narrative. An incoherent one, fragmented, composed solely of episodes, characteristic for the photo album. It’s not, however, a family album, but rather an utterly personal one, presenting the author’s ego and alter ego.

    In his essay The Uses of Photography, John Berger introduces a distinction between private photography and public photography. The first is characterised by a specific, clear meaning, the other, by an unspecified meaning that is open to the viewer’s interpretation 2. The issue is elaborated on by Sławomir Sikora, who notes that ‘in its private use, photography is always connected with a fact, something concrete (though it doesn’t have to be limited to it). We always see a concrete thing in the picture, this and not other person, this and not other dog. But as soon as we don’t know that it’s about a specific person or dog, we start thinking about people or dogs in general, or, alternatively, about the given dog breed’ 3. Borrowing the term from the originators of the Tartu School, Jurij Lotman and Boris Uspensky, Sikora suggests for the ‘world of private photography’ to be treated as the World of Proper Names, that is, perfectly non-synonymous words. ‘It would be a world in which photography has retained its magic power, a strong connection with its reference, a clear ontological stamp 4. Usually, however, we are having to do with pictures whose reference we don’t know, and we can only guess their meaning, which Sikora calls the ‘aporia of photography’, because ‘every interpretation of a photograph (which it itself permits) can potentially prove correct’ 5.

As we see, the theoreticians and anthropologists of photography attach a lot of significance to the role of the viewer. It depends on the viewer how the picture is ‘read’: whether he can attribute a specific meaning to it or whether he will only (or as much as) invest it with general meanings. This, however, is not the process of shifting from one state to the other. Aporia is inherent in photography’s nature. As Sikora writes, ‘the fluctuation between individual being and the idea of this being, a universal category, is a significant thing, and it is on the basis of this shift (or, we should rather say, ‘switch’), that metaphorisation or symbolisation often occurs’ 6.

    The essence of Wojciech Gilewicz’s photographic series consists precisely in the hardly perceptible ‘switch’ that Sikora writes about, in the balancing on the border between privacy and metaphorisation, the fluent shifting between ‘individual being and the idea of this being’. Even if we don’t know the pairs shown in the pictures, we can easily guess that each of the two models is in fact the artist himself. Taken together, the photographs arrange themselves into a whole, a documentary of individual existence, a collection of reminiscences about places, circumstances, people, and feelings. Within the set of private scenes they form, there are easily replaceable ones – one can easily identify very similar pictures, evoking similar impressions, made in the same locations at the same time. Transposed into the context of an exhibition or an art book, however, Gilewicz’s photographs lose the quality of referring to ‘individual being’ and acquire metaphorical or symbolic meaning instead, becoming, above all, the subject of aesthetic experience, opening themselves to the viewer’s interpretation (semantic intervention). The latter, however, seems to remain aware of the fact that, in their basic layer, these pictures belong to the world of Wojciech Gilewicz’s ‘private photographs’, the World of Proper Names, that if you find any point in them, this will be, as Roland Barthes himself argued, independent of the photographer’s will or that of the persons depicted.

    And yet, in Gilewicz’s case, this process is even more complex and multifaceted. Before a photograph is viewed by others, it is subjected to certain manipulation on the personal level. The protagonist is doubled. Does such a photograph still permit the ‘private’ interpretation, does it still remain in the World of Proper Names? It seems that the private layer is hidden more deeply, becoming more inaccessible. We are thus having to do with a common reality and a created one at the same time. A yoga teacher and his student on the mat, the one dressed in grey, the other half-naked, bending backwards, looking straight into the lens. A sort of tension can be felt in the seemingly natural situation. Similarly in the picture taken in an office of some kind, with one of the protagonists, completely naked and bald, sitting on a sofa and looking menacingly at the other one, sitting, fully dressed, on a swivel chair. Some of the photographs in the series look unreal, especially those with erotic connotations.

    The unifying feature of all the photographs in the series is not really the model’s double appearance (which we quickly get used to and treat as obvious) but the fact that in none of the pictures do the models touch each other, always remaining in a safe separation instead, at a distance from each other. This is suggested by the use of a dual-image filter which often leaves a darker or lighter strip across the frame. This barely perceptible border doesn’t allow the protagonists to meet. Sometimes, like when they sit at the opposite ends of a bench at the Greenpoint Ave. subway station, or stare, half-naked, into their laptop screens, they seem to be oblivious of each other. At other times, they look directly into the camera. When one, dressed up as a clown, applies makeup to his face and sends a furtive glance into the lens reflected in the mirror, the other, standing above, looks directly into the camera. More seldom their gazes meet, like in the photo where one lies on the floor and looks up at the other, who, stretched on a bed above, sends a trickle of saliva in his direction. In most of the photographs, however, an easily noticeable looking game is under way. A waiter, the notepad and pen in his hand, ready to take the order, looks at the customer who is engrossed in reading the menu. A naked men leaning from under the shower and reaching out for the towel directs his gaze towards the other man, drying his hair and looking into his own reflection in the mirror. Often this sequence of gazes stops at the viewer himself – the first of the protagonists looks at the second one who, in turn, looks into the camera. In this case, therefore, we can speak of unreciprocated attention.

    The use of the dual-image filter means also that Gilewicz’s photographs revolve around issues like loneliness, seclusion, lack of closeness. Hence, perhaps, the title of the series, Them, as if the author was distancing himself from his own image appearing in the pictures, but also the measures undertaken to diversify the character – the different clothes, nakedness contrasted with a clothed body, the different haircuts. One of the photos actually shows the very act of cutting hair. The artist, long-haired, stands with an electric haircutter in his hand and, at the same time, already shaved and naked, sits covered with the freshly cut curls of hair. As if he wanted to deny the inevitable flow of time with the picture.

    One picture offering a potential interpretative key to the whole series is that made in the typical photo studio, one of the few featuring a third person. It is the photographer for whom the artist poses. Seated on a stool, against the background of a photo wallpaper, he looks into the camera as the photographer, leaning over, releases the trigger. The other protagonist stands by, his gaze fixed on the viewer. With this complex arrangement Gilewicz lets us know that, after the image has been developed, the viewer replaces the photographer, takes his place as the gazer.

    In his series, Gilewicz reveals the relationship between the photographer/observer and the photographed subject, bringing out the nature of presenting your own form in the complex process of ‘photographing yourself’. As Hannah Arendt writes, ‘In contrast to the inorganic thereness of lifeless matter, living beings are not mere appearances. To be alive means to be possessed by an urge towards self-display which answers the fact of one’s own appearingness. (…) Seeming – the it-seems-t-me, dokei moi – is the mode, perhaps the only possible one, in which an appearing world is acknowledged and perceived. To appear always means to seem to others, and this seeming varies according to the standpoint and the perspective of the spectators. In other words, every appearing thing acquires, by virtue of its appearingness, a kind of disguise that may indeed – but does not have to – hide or disfigure it. Seeming corresponds to the fact that every appearance, its identity notwithstanding, is perceived by a plurality of spectators’ 7.Gilewicz wants not so much to ‘present himself’ as to put himself in another person’s, a spectator’s, position, to play both roles at once, he wants to ‘seem’ to himself, and thus to fathom out the nature of the phenomenon of appearance. This is not narcissism, as, contrary to what it may seem, the artist is not self-sufficient in the situations he initiates. He can be the model and the photographer at the same time but, ultimately, it is the viewer who replaces the latter – strange, neutral, in control of the ‘switch’. It is for him that Gilewicz reveals the mechanisms of the phenomenon, the necessity of being both the subject and the object that Arendt writes about. ‘Living beings, men and animals, are not just in the world, they are of the world, and this precisely because they are subjects and objects – perceiving and being perceived – at the same time’.8

    One of the possible modes of ‘self-display’ is photography, an instrument that allows us to play, in an improved, because more easily controlled, form, the role of the subject of other people’s gaze. Paraphrasing the title of Nan Goldin’s famous series, I’ll Be Your Mirror, you can say that Gilewicz becomes a mirror of himself. Both in and within the photographs, he examines himself like in a mirror. One of the pictures shows the two protagonists holding photographs in their hands in which you can recognise the image of a man. The way they hold back their tears hints at the story. A tragic one? Melodramatic? Feigned? The shadow of the tripod-mounted camera falls on one of the figures. This shadow replaces my shadow when I look at the photograph. The camera becomes the potential viewer. To whom had the photographs been directed that the protagonists hold on their hands? As if they were repeating after Apollinaire, ‘C'est la réalité des photos qui sont sur mon cœur que je veux’.9

 

 

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