Brilliantly inarticulate Polish conceptual art

Oskar Dawicki: the last Polish artist
Gambia Castle
26 February - 27 March 2010

This exhibition organised by Daniel Malone (who now lives in Warsaw) brings the work of Polish performance artist Oskar Dawicki to Gambia Castle. Dawicki specialises in an ironically morose art that features carefully crafted inarticulate wisecracks coated in a dour or hangdog veneer - asides sometimes muttered between sobs (sending up grovelling self-abasement) or questions answered with ‘I don’t know’ (ridiculing lacklustre passivity).

Often presenting himself as a rakish dandy wearing a glittering blue jacket, Dawicki exploits his urbane demeanour by making gentle – calculatingly self-effacing – murmurings about art, his many inadequacies, and visual culture in general.

The ten works he has chosen for Auckland vary. Three are amusing videos in the manner of those he and a performance group he is part of (Azorro) present on YouTube. One is the tearfully apologetic I’m Sorry (click here), and another (in the GC office) is computer-based, about opening folders to images of an increasingly turbulent sea - with the sound of The Doors’ 'Riders Of the Storm' gradually morphing into thunder and splintering glass.

The third video, The Unbearable Lightness of Meaning, is a sarcastic meditation on Lenin’s comment that film is the most important of the arts. On top of the monitor is a small china Madonna being mutilated by an American eagle. On the screen we see interminable, never ending credits from several Hollywood films like Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’, which occasionally tilt and veer off to the right like a drunken driver - mixed in with acerbic quips about the triviality of the movie industry. Dawicki likes to have fun manipulating subtitles.

Other works are more about ambiguities of language and identity. A work in the street-front window (normally used by Sue Crockford) taunts passersby with 10,000 Polish Zloty (about $NZ2000) as bait for a smash and grab, but actually – as you’d expect- it is just photocopied notes: though the catalogue listing says they’re authentic. A second work of images of cannabis plants on window sills, shows fake marijuana specimens made from recut and reassembled plastic bushes. Dawicki’s photos of these ‘plants’ on Polish window ledges are now positioned in Gambia Castle’s New Zealand windows.

Another presents a section of a famous Polish epic poem, but deliberately untranslated as something impossible to correlate - its identity and content being too unique. A fourth exploits paradox by having a sentence I’ve never made a work about the Holocaust, written on the gallery wall in pencil; this action of course making it a lie. A fifth uses the Gambia Castle door where Dawicki, like Bruce Lee, has seemingly hurled his body through the solid wooden panel, leaving a spreadeagled silhouette with a large body and small head. We know it is cut with a jigsaw, yet it smirks at film props and provides a visually witty introduction to this artist’s ‘corpus’ of work.

There is an even more slippery evasiveness about some other works, where visual properties are not supported by any confirmed underpinning physical or chemical structure. For example, a churning, gestural oil painting, made with vaseline mixed in with linseed oil and paint, has its hardening, oxidising process put on hold. It is a work literally about its own, seemingly never attainable, never completed, chemical process. Or a multiple, made of green rat bait laid out on paper, spelling out the term OD. Apart from being a joke about what art can do to the mental metabolism of its consumers, its poison is not that which relies on conventional overdosing, but is a gradually cumulative anticoagulant that is slowly absorbed, not relying on large single hits.

Dawicki’s art has a high quota of discreet cunning that goes beyond sly corner-of–the-mouth quips. It needs several visits for the thematic connections linking different works to become apparent, and YouTube is a great introduction. Gambia Castle is only open on Fridays and Saturdays and the show finishes this week.

Let's use people for guinea pigs, push them til they snap - and call it Art

Artur Żmijewski: Selected Works
Te Tuhi
4 October - 30 November 2008

A lot of artists are arseholes. That’s no big revelation. Par for the course perhaps, but I really wonder about Polish video artist, Artur Żmijewski.

What sort of guy would badger a frail 91 year old Auschwitz survivor into having a Nazi identification number that's tattooed on his arm ‘renovated’ with new ink – just to make some obscure point about victim mentality and Jewish passivity? What sort of prick would encourage different Polish communities of opposing ideologies to lovingly create symbolic banners promoting their respective viewpoints, then put them in one space and gradually encourage such mutual interference that civilities break down and they start smashing up each other’s handiwork? What kind of character would want to recreate the famous Stanford experiment of 1971, where normally decent people are paid to take on roles of prisoners and guards (they’re randomly allocated) so they end up being traumatised or temporarily turned into sadistic monsters?

Is Psychology that noble a cause it can justify screwing people over in the name of Art? Perhaps it is? Żmijewski is fascinated by techniques of manipulation, devious coercion, and sometimes, varieties of operant conditioning. People become pigeons or rats in a Skinner box. He is obsessed with the patterns of human behaviour but he is not a Behaviourist. He clearly believes in minds and not just bodily actions by themselves. Social minds really. How groups of individuals form collective units.

The real questions embedded in this Żmijewski show is how did he persuade the various subjects to participate? He must be incredibly charming, with a steely but subtle mind that knows all about the intricacies of emotional blackmail and the strategies of maintaining power relationships.

Remembering that the main theme is such structures, there are several sorts of ‘victim’ in his projects. Often they are people with ghastly disabilities or body mutilations. Or lowly paid labourers with very dull jobs who let themselves be filmed 24 hours a day; or respected people (by virtue of their occupations, like soldiers) who take off their uniforms to march and sing; or both sexes, old and young, naked playing chasing in a concentration camp gas chamber. Sometimes, after initial shyness or disgust, they actually end up having fun. So Żmijewski is not always being damaging – though perhaps the subjects might have regrets later.

The best works though, go beyond psychological and somewhat voyeuristic exercises, to present a moving kind of poetry that is meticulously presented on film. One project shows an amputee being supported by a two limbed person, so that while walking the naked torsos merge and appear to form a three legged man. The cropping and editing of the image is very clever, and the image haunting – even when the two naked men struggle to get up and down from a mattress.

Despite my misgivings, there is no doubt this work raises a lot of interesting issues to ponder – besides the above topics like conditioning, or social structures that spawn sadism. Some of these question our attitudes to our own and other peoples’ bodies (healthy or otherwise), or the propriety and decorum in art galleries as spaces (their various no-go subject matters), or how far is freedom of speech ever really permitted or encouraged in the art world – if at all?