FEATURE Wilhelm Sasnal Interview

FEATURE

Wilhelm Sasnal Interview: Velocity Equals Displacement Over an Interval of Time Essay: Overturning the Everyday

Velocity Equals Displacement Over an Interval of Time By Andrew Maerkle

Born in 1972 in Tarnów, Poland, Wilhelm Sasnal is among a new generation of contemporary artists who emerged following the country’s transition from Communist to democratic rule in 1989. He is best known for making paintings that combine elements of representation and abstraction to depict images based on photographs that he takes himself or that he ﬁ nds in other sources ranging from books to ﬁ lms and websites.

As such, these paintings maintain a delicate balance between personal intimacy and distanced irony. Common subjects for Sas- nal include his own family and experiences as well as the history of Poland and the role the country played in the Holocaust during World War II. At other times he “documents” the landscape around Tarnów where he was raised, often using expressive brushstrokes to communicate atmosphere through minimalist gestures, or he will obliterate key details from his source images, as with the painting Untitled (After Metinides) (2003), which blurs behind a ﬂ urry of monochrome hues everything but some ﬁ gures loitering in the background of an airplane crash site that had been photographed by the Mexican photojournalist Enrique Metinides. Yet it is hard to say whether for Sasnal any one subject is more or less personal, or more or less ironic than the next.

What one can say is that Sasnal is a keen observer of the human environment, which is also apparent in his separate practice as a fi lmmaker. Shooting primarily with a 16mm camera, Sasnal imbues his fi lms with a painterly eye that is attune to the viscosity of ac- tion, the taffy-like bonds that hold together the plastic world. For example, in Marfa (2005), Sasnal’s camera lingers on oil that spills out from the car he is having refurbished and seeps over the bare, fl eshy torso of a gargantuan mechanic. In The Ranch (2006/07), he is absorbed by the nonchalant barbarity of ranch hands dehorning and castrating young bulls, zeroing in on the freshly shorn testicles frying on a makeshift grill and the men gingerly picking the sizzling meat up with their fi ngers.

ART iT met with Sasnal when he came to Tokyo for the opening of his solo exhibition at Rat Hole Gallery, “16mm fi lms,” which includes both recent paintings as well as the short fi lms Marfa, Love Songs (2005) and Centrum (2004). He discussed with ART iT the relationship between his fi lms, the landscape and his paintings, as well as his youth growing up in Poland and his stance toward the country’s history. Considering Sasnal’s practices as painter and fi lmmaker in tandem, it’s tempting to see him as equal parts satirist and off-kilter ethnographer. However, the idea that the artist intends to make an overarching statement about social conditions is always undermined by the inclusion in his works of his own subjective viewpoint.

As Sasnal told ART iT, he responds to the world through intuition, a way of seeing or feeling that circumvents the rational order of things. His work is distinct because it ﬁ nds a unique space between the trivial and signiﬁ cant. Part I. Like Everyone Born in the 1940s, My Mother Was a Fan of Elvis

Wilhelm Sasnal on the role of chance in documenting the world, and the connections between ﬁ lm, Land Art and painting.

Installation view of Untitled (2007), 16mm ﬁ lm, sound, 7 min. Courtesy the artist & Hauser & Wirth, London/New York/Zürich.

ART iT: You are known both for your paintings and your 16mm fi lms, so there’s a lot to cover when discussing your work, but I thought we could start somewhere in the middle. In 2007 I saw your exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Zürich where you showed an untitled 16mm fi lm with found footage of Elvis Presley doing a live performance of “Unchained Melody” shortly before he died. It was my fi rst time seeing one of your fi lms and it left a strong impression on me. What struck me was that the fi lm encapsulated a uniquely transitory moment in society’s relationship to media and historical consciousness, since you were using 16mm fi lm to document a computer with YouTube video of footage that had been shot in 1977. Was that part of the intent of the work?

WS: I am aware of the idea that the fi lm has these different convergences of media, but to be honest that’s simply how I use existing images. These images are all around us; they are part of our reality. It’s never been a particular intention of mine to criticize or play with them. I respond to them intuitively. The fi lm and the paintings that were in the exhibition were more or less about Graceland. While doing a residency in the US I made a trip to Memphis and I thought that since I was there I should see Graceland. But when you enter this empty house and see all the tourists walking everywhere, it is profoundly sad. And from being very cynical I responded to the specifi city of that place. So I made paintings based on photographs I took of the interiors and began searching for Elvis on YouTube. The songs in the fi lm are both great songs. When I saw Elvis in that footage, he looked really insane. I think his insanity started quite earlier when he became totally detached from reality, having his handlers constantly “protecting” him. That’s what led me to also include the YouTube footage of Daniel Johnston singing “Casper the Friendly Ghost.”

ART iT: How about the fi lm Widlik, also made in 2007, which features footage of your family at the beach alongside voice-overs re- counting the story of a father who disappears from his family, and concludes with a scene of a computer on the beach playing a video of David Bowie singing “Space Oddity”? WS: Widlik is a type of seaweed from the Baltic Sea. I’m a bit reluctant to show the fi lm now because I don’t like the multiple narra- tors, I have to go back and record one person who will narrate the whole thing. But it’s just a made-up story that started from spend- ing time together with my family at the coast and having the camera with me the whole time - this black body of the camera - and of course everyday quarrels about it, “You’re not playing with us!” That was how the story developed. “Space Oddity” fi ts at the end because it tells a similar story, with Major Tom fl ying away in space. And the computer was just what I happened to have on hand at the time.

Left: Still from Widlik (2007), 16mm ﬁ lm, sound, 10 min. Right: Still from The Ranch (2006/07), Super8 ﬁ lm, transferred to DVD, 35 min.

ART iT: In addition to the untitled Elvis piece, you made several fi lms during your stay in the US, including The Ranch (2006/07), which ends with this great scene of a female TV reporter shooting a report on location underneath a highway overpass. Wearing a mini-skirt and go-go boots, she is shown in soft-focus silhouette, and combined with the soundtrack of Vikki Carr singing the Burt Bacharach song “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” it looks like one of those early music videos from the 1960s or ‘70s. For me, the music accentuates the vanity of the reporter and the incongruity of her outfi t at this very urban scene with a police barri- cade visible in the background. How much does music shape your fi lms?

WS: Well, during my stay in the US I had a Super 8 camera with me and I fi lmed a lot of footage, so there is still more material that I plan to use. For the most part the footage is casual, I just happen to be there. The story behind the reporter is interesting. I was in Chicago, where there are large Polish and Mexican Catholic communities. Somebody noticed a stain on the wall of the underpass and thought it was a sign from the Virgin Mary. But it was just leakage. So people came and put fl owers and lit candles in front of the stain, and I happened to be there when they were shooting the report. I think that when you turn the music off the fi lms don’t exist. I’m currently planning a new feature-length fi lm about greed in a Polish village, which will also make reference to events from World War II. When I imagine how the fi lm will take shape I see it starting with documentary footage from the village where we will be shooting. As I play the images in my head, I know the exact music that I want to go with that footage.

ART iT: Yes, I was going to ask about your recent feature ﬁ lms, do you make them by yourself or do you have crews and multiple cameras?

WS: The fi lms on display at Rat Hole Gallery right now are all small pieces that I did by myself without anyone around me. But in 2008 I made the fi lm Swineherd, which centers on a swineherd who delivers clandestine letters between two young, lesbian lovers living in the Polish countryside. That was my fi rst advanced, complex production. The outcome was a feature fi lm almost 90 minutes long. Now we are fi nishing post-production on a second feature-length fi lm, with a psychedelic plot set in a post-atomic reality. Swineherd had a lot of art elements in it. There were several independent segments within the fi lm, so I still had the excuse that it wasn’t a proper feature fi lm, it was experimental. With the second fi lm there is less experimentation, and I believe the third fi lm that we are planning now will be a true feature fi lm. It’s been an ongoing process working with crews. Swineherd was totally chaotic because we were working with friends. For the second production we had a big crew but there were too many people even though it was a cheap production. There was no intimacy on the set at all. I hope with the third fi lm we can fi nd the right amount of people so that it’s neither chaotic nor crowded.

ART iT: In that sense it seems that the short fi lm Marfa (2005) is an important bridge from short to feature fi lms as it is structured around this black Cadillac that you have refurbished and then stripped down to create a kind of performance and communal platform in the middle of the landscape, with a band using it as a stage and people lounging in the exposed back seat. Left: Still from the fi lm Swineherd (2008), 35mm fi lm, b/w, sound, 85 min. 46 sec. Right: Still from Marfa (2005), 16mm fi lm, sound, 25 min. Courtesy the artist, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, and Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo.

WS: That was actually the fi rst longer fi lm I did where it had a certain plot that I wrote for myself. That was a very special moment for me. I was responding to my situation during my residency in Marfa. I met this band, and I knew I wanted this car for the fi lm but I didn’t yet know what kind of fi lm I was going to make. And the landscape was inspiring.

ART iT: Actually I thought the ﬁ lm had a subtle Land Art feel to it.

WS: That’s very good! I really like Land Art. It’s quite interesting about the land and the landscape. When I look at Old Master paintings, I love to look at the landscapes because I think these are still such incredible images. And it appeals to me because I can still see these landscapes now. In fact my interest in Land Art led me to make several paintings about Robert Smithson.

ART iT: I wouldn’t necessarily have made the connection from simply looking at your paintings, but you put the ideas of painting, ﬁ lm and Land Art together.

WS: Yes. Again, it wasn’t my intention but that’s how it happened and now I can look back and understand my interests. When I told people I was going to Marfa they would all ask whether I was going to see Lightning Field and so on. I think it’s also a question of whether Land Art was about making a piece in the landscape or rather emphasizing what the landscape is about. When we went to Spiral Jetty, it was such a tiny piece. It’s not impressive if you try to separate it from the landscape. The Great Salt Lake, that is the true piece of art. No one can compete with the landscape and its immensity.

Part II. Silent Landscapes Begin to Speak Wilhelm Sasnal discusses visualizing history and the ‘ethos of painting.’

ART iT: Considering your admiration for Land Art, it seems notable that you have made several paintings about the landscape around Tarnów where you grew up as well as Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale and Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 ﬁ lm about the Holocaust in Poland, Shoah. Why did you start making those paintings?

WS: Even though I was born in 1972, I felt that I grew up in a post-war reality. The inﬂ uence of World War II in this region of the world is inescapable. When you travel through Poland and you see all these monuments, you become aware that this soil has absorbed a lot of blood. You cannot be indifferent to that. But I also started using historical subjects when I realized that there was something uncool about it, at least for me personally. Prior to that I had been totally focused on youth culture and everyday life, I wasn’t thinking about history and how to use it in art. And then I realized that I wanted to try something that I would ﬁ nd uncool, to address a subject that I wouldn’t have approached before. These paintings were somehow already inside me.

ART iT: Was there anything speciﬁ c, though, that triggered the switch from youth culture to historical subjects?

WS: I made the switch around the time that people in Poland ﬁ rst began discussing the history in an open way. Prior to the war, Po- land was home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities, and that community was completely exterminated by the war’s end. But in school we learned only that 6 million Poles were killed during the war, no one mentioned that over half of them were of Jewish ethnicity. Left: Moscice 1 (2005), oil on canvas, 100 x 140 cm. Courtesy collection Fundação de Serralves – Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto. Right: Shoah (Forest) (2002), oil on canvas, 45 x 45 cm. Photo A. Burger, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth London/New York/Zürich.

These were subjects that had been hidden for 50 years and weren’t really mentioned. But between 1999 and 2003, the Polish edition of Maus was released and Jan T. Gross published his book Neighbors, about the Polish village Jedwabne where in 1941 the Jewish community were massacred by their neighbors. And Lanzmann’s Shoah was broadcast for the ﬁ rst time on Polish TV, so we could ﬁ nally see the history in a new light.

ART iT: But your strategy for the paintings based on Maus and Shoah was indirect, with key details such as ﬁ gures or facial features removed from images you were referencing. One painting that stands out in particular is Shoah (Forest) (2002), with three small ﬁ g- ures positioned in front of a towering expanse of swirling green brush strokes.

WS: Yes, of course. I think Maus and Shoah are important works of art, and I was using these existing works to reconsider the past. Recently Lanzmann has been back in the news because he has been engaged in public debate with the French author Yannick Haenel about the role of the Polish resistance fi ghter Jan Karski during the war. Karski, who escaped Poland and testifi ed to Allied leaders about the Nazi extermination camps, was interviewed by Lanzmann for Shoah, and is the subject of a recent book by Haenel. In his book, Haenel accused Lanzmann of editing his interview with Karski, while Lanzmann has countered that Haenel is a historical revi- sionist. At stake is the credibility of Shoah as well as the relationship between fi ction and documentation. So right before I came to Japan I started re-watching Shoah, which I had recorded for myself when it was broadcast. When I got to this scene with the three fi gures coming out of the forest, I had to stop the fi lm again; it is such a strong image. The script for my new feature-length fi lm includes a number of scenes that take place in forest settings, and I thought, “This is a scene that has to be there in my own fi lm.”

ART iT: So when you watched that scene almost 10 years ago it made an impact and even now it is just as strong?

WS: Absolutely. The interesting thing about Shoah is that the fi lm is so selfi sh. I mean, Lanzmann was so selfi sh, and I admire that. Of course in terms of political correctness there is a controversial element to how he made the fi lm, how he approached and interviewed these Polish peasants from the position of a French intellectual. The situation was always in his advantage and he could ma- nipulate it. He knew what questions to ask to get the responses he wanted. But anyways the fi lm is a work of art. And when you see the slow movement of the camera panning across the silent landscape, it’s so sinister, this void. This awareness of the landscape and what it bears, what’s behind it, or under it, is amazing.

ART iT: I also feel that kind of emotional resonance in your paintings - the sublime feeling of the trees and the tiny ﬁ gures goes beyond a simple reproduction of an image.

WS: Yes. Behind all my paintings there is a story. That’s why I cannot say that I paint abstractions even if some of them look that way. I have never made an abstract painting; there is always a story behind the visual elements.

ART iT: When you were doing the Maus and Shoah paintings how much thought did you put into choosing the images that you used?

WS: At that time I just responded to intuition. I can predict what images will intrigue me, and what images I can transform through the painting into something that is even more intriguing, even more vague. What’s interesting is that during the painting process many associations come to me, it’s like a whole story is built up again or maybe put into a verbal language that I speak to myself as I paint. There are these links to the existing works. Of course, some subjects are really light and I’m not going to overload them with more meaning than necessary.

Left: Shoah (2003), oil on canvas, 40 x 70 cm. Right: Lata Walki (2005), oil on canvas, 150 x 190 cm.

ART iT: Is there a difference between Shoah (Forest) and your portrait of Robert Smithson, Untitled (Smithson) (2002), or a painting of a toilet in a bar in Kraków?

WS: In terms of the approach to the subject, not so much. Sometimes when I want to play with existing materials or a certain form there are differences, but I treat painting very seriously. When I have the feeling that the painting is done, I leave it. I never leave the painting when I have doubts about it. I’m never so cynical to think about a painting, “Maybe it’s not OK, but it’s going to sell anyway.” I am responsible to myself. I believe in an ethos of painting.

ART IT: But clearly your deﬁ nition of when a work is ﬁ nished is quite broad, since in your text painting Lata Walki (2005) you ended up cutting out the words from the canvas entirely.

WS: That was fun. Lata Walki, meaning “Years of Struggle,” was the title of a chapter from a stupid Polish war fi lm. I really liked that phrase, and thought it was meaningful. I tried to paint it several times but the letters never looked right. I really struggled with the painting. I over-painted the text two or three times before I fi nally gave up and cut the words out. I’m increasingly attracted to the ugliness of painting, making mistakes, collapsing. It’s partly a reaction to what I don’t like in contemporary painting. Painting is a tough job. I could never be only a painter. Maybe that’s why I also need to make fi lms. I’m afraid of approaching painting on my knees, of trying to be a master, because I think it’s a waste of effort. How many paintings can you paint to prove to yourself that you’re a master - that you’ve achieved what you wanted to achieve? Rather than trying to reassure myself, it’s more productive to doubt myself about what I do. It’s also a reaction - not necessarily to the market, as such - to how painters try to make catchy pieces that will be noticed by the audience. Of course I understand that I’m also saying this from a privileged position.

ART iT: One thing that interests me is that you’ve generally resisted the urge to make monumental canvases.

WS: I think the biggest work I’ve made is 2 by 2.2 meters. That’s fairly big, but actually I cannot make anything bigger because it wouldn’t fi t through my door. In any case it’s not a particular desire of mine. This goes back to my previous answer: I never assume that I’m going to paint a masterpiece. I work with the canvases that I have. Amid the current fl ood of images in our society, I think painting is in a very special situation compared to previous ages when it was the only way to depict the world. I’m not so naïve to believe that painting can change the world or change people, because it is no longer a medium of “mass destruc- tion,” as fi lm can be. Because we have become blind to the images around us, and are so fed up with them, I think it actually returns painting to a position similar to what it occupied in the past. It’s a way to turn images into something physical. Part III. Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Your Grievances Wilhelm Sasnal addresses the infl uence of music on his artistic development and walking the line between the trivial and signifi cant.

Untitled (2001), acrylic on canvas, 153 x 180 cm.

ART iT: You make both paintings and ﬁ lms, but to what degree do you consider them separate practices?

WS: I consider them separate practices, but my reliance on intuition links both painting and ﬁ lmmaking for me. Intuition is about a way of seeing, or the way I crop the image. So when I do the ﬁ lms, even if I’m working with a team of people, I still hold a camera.

ART iT: The similarities are not merely visual though. I feel your paintings have a musical quality to them in the way that they combine aspects of representation and abstraction - in addition to the fact that you have painted images of musicians and album covers - and that suggests another parallel with your ﬁ lms, a kind of audio-visual approach.

WS: Actually, my interest in art started through music. When I was 14 or 15 I was really into Metal music and then gradually explored more alternative genres. It was through this exploration that I began to see how music and what you might call the “apparatus” of music are connected to art and the “apparatus” of art. At the same time I began to realize I had a basic artistic talent, redrawing the covers of records. It was common then for students to have leather bags with a ﬂ at cover over the back, and that cover made a great surface for ballpoint pen drawings. I would make the shadows with the pen and then use a razor to scratch in the light, so I could achieve a really nice effect. I did many of those backpack drawings for myself and for my friends.

ART iT: What kind of music was making it into the country at that time? WS: Culturally Poland was different from other Eastern Bloc countries because the government was relatively liberal, even though it was behind the Iron Curtain. Obviously, this was before the Internet, and we learned about music through friends or from the radio. The radio stations in Poland actually broadcast really good stuff and we were quite up-to-date with what was happening outside of the country. The stations would broadcast whole records at a time and the DJs would even let listeners know when they could turn their cassette tapes to record the other side of the vinyl. There were also these stores to which you could bring your blank cassettes and then tell the staff which records you wanted to have recorded. Quality was an issue though because sometimes by the time you had your own recording it was already a fourth- or ﬁ fth-generation copy. That’s how I learned about music, and probably what I was listening to was not so different from what people on the other side of the Curtain listened to. I remember very clearly that when I was 15 I heard Bauhaus for the ﬁ rst time and started listening to them as well as Joy Division and other UK bands from the ‘80s.

Left: Stereolab (2000), oil on canvas, 52 x 48 cm. Right: Untitled (2009), oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm. Courtesy the artist, Anton Kern Gallery,Gallery, New YYork,ork, and Rat Hole Gallery,Gallery, Tokyo.Tokyo.

ART iT: With all these re-recordings of recordings, maybe that’s where your interest in double mediation comes from, making paintings of images and ﬁ lms of videos?

WS: Maybe. I remember also that at the music stores you could buy photographs - real, black-and-white photos that had been developed at a lab - of the record cover and the titles of the songs, which you could then insert into your cassette case. It was really hand- made.

ART iT: That brings me back to your untitled Elvis fi lm. I had never heard Elvis’s version of “Unchained Melody” until I saw the fi lm, with Elvis seated at a grand piano on stage before an adoring crowd, sweating profusely and singing into a microphone held by an assistant. There’s a maudlin element to the scenario, but seeing it in your work it gave me this idea that even a Pop song can become an event, and even a commonplace image can communicate a specifi c situation.

WS: I believe that visual art can chew over everything again and fi nd new contexts for it. Art is an experimental fi eld for the other disciplines like music and fi lm. Divisions between Classical and Pop are totally obsolete. When you fi nd the proper context, something can take on meaning. It’s similar to one of the paintings on display at Rat Hole Gallery with the woman’s legs sticking out from behind a bush. The image is of a sculpture I saw recently, a fake, plaster sculpture at a garden at this place where I go for holidays. I saw it hidden in the bush and it intrigued me. In a way it’s a trivial, stupid image but it can take on meaning if you look beyond that fi rst glance.

ART iT: I guess part of it is also coming to terms with the redundancy of images, and the idea that we’re more conscious now than ever before of how difﬁ cult it is to make an actually new image. The same applies to music too. There are only miniscule variations between all these different songs, or between the Righteous Brothers’ version of “Unchained Melody” and Elvis’s version.

WS: Yes, it’s like walking along the edge of a cliff. You have to fi nd your own way. If you stay away from the edge then you’ll be safe but you’ll be among the crowd, no different from anyone else. If you go too far over the edge you can fall down. The mainstream is overfl owing to such an extent that the edge is really just a tiny sliver of space. When you are right on the edge, it’s dangerous and challenging, but that is where the most crucial and signifi cant things happen. I think there is a certain perversity in it. ART iT: I had this dream the other night that I was on board a crashing airplane, and for some reason it seems like a good metaphor for considering the velocity behind art, what gives a painting or fi lm its presence. In my dream as the gravitational pull kept getting stronger and stronger I was very calm and, realizing I only had 30 seconds or so to do something, began thinking about the members of my family and saying to each one “I love you.” Of course in the airplane as I say “I love you,” they’re not going to hear it, but it was important for me to speak it at that instant. So in a sense at the right velocity something that is banal or pointless can become almost heroic.

WS: I know what you mean. It’s like with a sunset, it’s beautiful, yet in certain images it’s just kitsch. By the way I have had many dreams about plane crashes, not as a passenger but as a witness. These dreams always took place in this district where I lived in my youth. I know it’s quite terrible but it was very fascinating to see those dreams, very important for me. I have painted airplanes many times as a metaphor, I guess, for the achievements of humanity. But as you say about saying “I love you,” it depends on the circumstances. That’s how to approach the edge and to ﬁ nd your own way along it. When you say, “I love you,” it can sound banal but on the other hand it can also sound dramatic, and then be true, just as with a sunset.

Cover Image: Untitled (2007), oil on canvas, 160 x 200 cm. Courtesy Naomi Milgrom Collection, Australia, and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Based in Kraków, Wilhelm Sasnal is represented by Sadie Coles HQ, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Hauser & Wirth and Anton Kern galleries. He has had solo exhibitions at international institutions including the Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw), the Swiss Institute (New York), Douglas Hyde Gallery (Dublin), Vanabbe Museum (Eindhoven) and M HKA (Antwerp). In 2006 he was awarded the Vincent Van Gogh Biennial Award for Contemporary Art in Europe. Wilhelm Sasnal: Essay

Wilhelm Sasnal: Overturning the Everyday By Akiko Kasuya

Untitled (The Concert) (2009), oil on canvas, 70 x 55 cm.

Wilhelm Sasnal was born in 1972 in Tarnów, a small city just outside Poland’s former capital, Kraków. After studying architecture at Kraków University of Technology, he transferred to the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, from which he graduated in 1999. During his years as a student from 1995 to 2001, Sasnal participated in the artist group Grupa Ładnie. Working together with peers including Rafał Bujnowski (1974-) and Marcin Maciejowski (1974-), he focused on making paintings and drawings that explored how to trans- gress the boundaries between art and everyday life.

From early on, Sasnal chose familiar objects for his motifs, and he incorporated into his pictures the casualness and familiarity of the everyday. His simplifi cation of form and use of bright colors can be associated with Neo-Pop Art; however, the social and political approach in his work can be traced to infl uences from the Łódź Kaliska group, famous for their radical and anarchist, yet humorous artistic activities under Poland’s former Communist regime. Sasnal’s focus on the ordinary and everyday also underscored the intimacy of his relationships with close friends. Even in their group activities, the Ładnie members were more concerned with their personal relationships than defi ning an artistic movement. The motifs they expressed, and the group name itself, meaning “beauty,” hinted at an agenda fraught with a certain degree of irony. Even after the group disbanded, its members have each maintained this basic approach in their individual practices.

Sasnal fi rst gained international recognition as a painter around 2000, but in recent years his fi lms have also attracted increasing attention. As Sasnal says himself, until 2004 he primarily exhibited only paintings and his fi lms remained largely unseen (1). A key transition point occurred in 2006 when Sasnal was nominated for the Vincent van Gogh Biennial Award for Contemporary Art in Europe. For the exhibition of the nominees at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Sasnal unexpectedly decided to show only his fi lms. This adventurous move overturned preconceptions about Sasnal that had begun to take root and also signaled an important breakthrough in the artist’s career, as he went on to win the award. It also coincided with a period when recent developments in technology had led to a dramatic reduction in the size of video equipment and allowed functionally superior equipment to be obtained at relatively low cost, thereby creating an unparalleled infl ux of video works within the contemporary art world. However, rather than using video, Sasnal has consistently used 8mm and 16mm fi lm cameras (which can be seen as a parallel to his use of the traditional paintbrush and canvas for his paintings) to produce sophisticated fi lms that refl ect the infl uence of music videos and integrate a psychedelic sensibility in depicting subjects such as the landscape and his family.

In the summer of 2007, as I was preparing for the “Still/Motion: Liquid Crystal Painting” exhibition that focused on the relationship between painting and fi lm/video (2), I had the opportunity to research works from the “1, 2, 3 Avant-Gardes: Archives, Film, Art, Experimentation” exhibition held at Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. Not only were Sasnal’s fi lms deeply affecting in particular, but they also changed the way I look at his paintings. Sasnal’s paintings and fi lms resonate in harmony with each other. For instance, the “painterly quality” of his fi lms can be seen in his attention to texture and in his camerawork. The work that was being shown in Warsaw was Untitled (2000-06), which depicted vaguely silhouetted human fi gures moving slowly in time to pop music. I was moved by the work’s sense of ephemerality, its combination of poignancy with visual lushness, and could not stop watching. Installation view of Marfa (2005), 16mm fi lm, sound, 25 min.

Similarly, Sasnal’s installation of the three fi lms Marfa (2006), Love Songs (2005) and Centre (2004) alongside a group of six paintings in his current exhibition at Tokyo’s Rat Hole Gallery, “16mm fi lms,” is fi lled with tension, realizing a kind of alien world. Although his paintings were included in the exhibition “Essential Painting” at Osaka’s National Museum of Art in 2006, this is his fi rst solo exhibition in Japan, and the fi rst opportunity for audiences here to see his fi lms and paintings together.

It should be noted that there are several historically signifi cant examples of collaborations between music and fi lm/video in Polish avant-garde fi lm, such as Oko i ucho (The Eye and the Ear, 1945) - a brilliant combination of Karol Symanowski’s (1882-1937) music and the Surrealistic animation of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson (1910-88/1907-88). Alternatively, one can think of the various experiments by the Neo Avant-garde artists of the 1970s who used fi lm to record the occurrences of daily life through the lens of a camera. In particular, one might recall the work of Józef Robakowski (1939-), who investigated themes related to private and everyday life and created several radical and humorous works that rebelled against the strict censorship of Communist rule at the time (3), and the pioneering artistic experiments of Natalia LL (1937-), known for making conceptual works in the 1970s.

As for Sasnal, while carrying forward the lineage of Polish Avant-garde and Neo Avant-garde art, he was also infl uenced (most likely through his education at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts) by late 20th-century painters from Kraków such as Maria Jarema (1908- 58) and Jerzy Nowosielski (1923-). Regarding the responsibility of addressing the tradition of painting, Sasnal’s view of his role as a painter is complex and ambiguous (4), but the “power to overturn” brought about by Sasnal’s sincere artistic activities is extremely signifi cant in this complicated era when the existential meaning of art is continually in question. Moreover, both Sasnal’s paintings and fi lm works, directly tied to the artist’s personal daily life, contain elements of Post-structuralism and references to Structuralism and Modernism, which are interlaced to deconstruct Minimalism and serve the role of placing the imagined object once more in the realm of reality. As a result, Sasnal’s work allows us to continually reinvent the relationship between ourselves and the everyday.

1, 4. Wilhelm Sasnal: “Lata Walki,” Zacheta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, Warszawa, 2007/Galeria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Trento, 2008 2. “Still/Motion: Liquid Crystal Painting,” Mie Prefectural Art Museum/The National Museum of Art, Osaka/Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2008 3. In Communist-ruled countries, only art based on Socialist realism could be offi cially exhibited. Poland was considered a relatively moderate regime compared to other Eastern Bloc states, but artworks that pertained to political contexts or showed any sign of expressing criticism of the Soviet Union were strictly censored, forbidden to be showed publicly and sometimes even confi scated or destroyed. For this reason, artists used sophisticated metaphors and analogies, and sometimes realist expressions associated with daily life, to demonstrate creativity in their artistic activities. They often exhibited in private apartments or basements so that only sympathetic individuals could see the work, and exhibition documentation was rarely made lest there remain any evidence of subversive activities that could be turned over to authorities. In order to reconstruct and verify facts from the time period, memories from the people involved, fragments of fi lm, low quality document copies and handwritten notes that were secretly archived are currently being investigated.