author: Marek Wasilewski
The artist, like a child, is passive. The artist remains a child who is no longer innocent yet cannot liberate himself from unconscious.1Louise Bourgeois
If I were asked what deserves most of the viewer’s attention in Piotr Kurka’s works, I would say that his concern about detail is the most intriguing. It is because of details that we leave at first unnoticed though they are wrought with meticulousness bordering on the absurd, that what is in itself mysterious and puzzling at his exhibitions, ceases to be just an impression, a skillfully evoked mood, and becomes a fact. For instance, the enormous silvery tear hanging from the ceiling in the Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok. We look at ourselves in it the way we do in a mirror. Beside, there is a deformed ceramic sculpture of a dwarf seaman. Reflected, the observer’s body is stocky and grotesque like the standing figure. On the other side of the looking glass, we are just as deformed and ridiculous as figures transplanted from some reality different from ours, into ours. Looking at the tear and the seaman, we have to make up our mind where we want to be: where we are not much different from the mysterious ceramic figure or where we shall remain ourselves, though enriched with the parallel perspective experience. There is a mysterious sense of balance between these two worlds in Piotr Kurka’s oeuvre, but the balance is frail and tense.Louise Bourgeois says that sculpture is an exorcism and when one is really depressed and apparently with no other way out except suicide, sculpture is likely to give a disentangling impulse and restore some kind of harmony. This is what it is for.2 If her words can be referred to any definite work, in my opinion they certainly can to the figure of the dwarfish seaman. The smile of the ceramic sailor with a brass strainer in his cap is one of the noteworthy details. The somewhat inclined chubby face seems to emanate warmth and kindness. Yet there is a sense of anxiety and a throb of horror in the empty eye-sockets. The impression is enhanced by the strainer. It brings home to us that the figure is empty inside, that we are dealing with is just a crust or phantom. His skin marks the border between our worlds. His eyes and mouth, filled with black, are cavities through which nothingness manifests itself. An acute sense of alienation comes from the reversal of creative order: the artist does not create his sculptures in the semblance of man but, as the father says in Bruno Schulz’s Tailors’ Dummies, ‘he wishes to create man a second time – in the shape and semblance of a tailors’ dummy.’3Piotr Kurka says that ‘the seaman stands for travel, also that through time, understood as a metaphor of life. It may stand for travel in the sense of a dream or Rimbaud’s last journey.’4 Bruno Bettelheim wrote that there was no better method permitting us to understand the extremely confused contradictions of our mind and our inner life than isolating definite aspects of our personality and marking them with symbols.5 Another element of the work under discussion is the small built-in wall shelf beneath a magnifying glass with a small toy seaman inside, in which we may surmise the pattern on which the bigger one standing on the floor is modelled. In other words, it is one and the same person in two guises. Perhaps these are just two contradictory aspects of his personality: one enclosed and limited, the other full of imagination, anxious for the world of travel and adventure, representing the pleasure principle, as Freud might put it. They are like a child confined by family commands and bans, and an adult who can do what he pleases. If we think about the relation between these two figures, we come to the conclusion that the qualities of the small one are naturally transferred from him to the big one. Does it mean that if an ‘adult’ is a monster, he was also one as a child? The situation is additionally confused by the inscription on the wall, a sentence from the autobiography of the Chinese Zen master Xu Yun: ‘…when it was burned the next day, the air filled with a strange smell, and white smoke went to the sky. Over a hundred big relics in five colours were found in the ashes, in addition to countless small ones, mostly white; all were pure and shiny.’ We are looking round. Is the drop one of the pure shiny relics? Does the word ‘it’ refer to the seaman’s body which has been burned? With these questions left unanswered, we enter the successive space.It is divided according to the colours of parts of clothing scattered on the floor. Black garments are on the left, white are on the right, and the whole space is divided diagonally. On the black side, the artist has placed a dozen-odd different size lamps with lamp-shades. On the white side, there is an overturned lamp with a black dog or a wolf standing astride over it. The animal is not simply a stuffed realistic dummy, it is not an exhibit on loan from a natural science museum showcase. Looking at the wolf, and finding several excellently rendered details, we feel as if we were suspended between sleep and watching, as if our unrealised fears and apprehensions first saw the light of day. They crouch from wardrobes and old cupboards like creatures in Bruno Schulz who describes in detail where they hatch: ‘in certain strictly defined environments, such as old apartments saturated with the emanations of numerous existences and events; used-up atmospheres rich in the specific ingredients of human dreams; rubbish heaps abounding in the humus of memories, of nostalgia, and of sterile boredom.’ ‘They were creations resembling, in appearance only, living creatures such as crustaceans, vertebrates, cephalopods. In reality the appearance was misleading – they were amorphous creatures, with no internal structures, products of the imitative tendency of matter... In creatures conceived in this way, one could observe the processes of respiration and metabolism, but chemical analysis revealed in them traces neither of albumen nor of carbon compounds.’6Piotr Kurka has once said that he called the sailor ‘Father’.7 Louise Bourgeois says that the she-wolf is simply her mother.8 Bettelheim writes that animals represent the primeval and unrestrained in our nature, the unbridled energy, but there are also animals that come to our help and they symbolise positive energy.The black wolf here is an intruder, a kidnapper or the guardian of good sleep, the mother she-wolf. We are not quite sure which. In our notions of good and evil, we evidently want a border as sharp as that between the black and the white clothes. What should be done when the wolf/she-wolf is out of place? Piotr Kurka has placed an inscription in front of the entrance to the installation: ‘Conflict between good and evil is mental illness.’ So perhaps no line can be drawn between the wolf and the she-wolf. After all, the brothers Strugatski have written: ‘Good may only be created from evil because there is nothing else from which it can emerge.’From this troubled world, we move on to the next room. On the wall is a brown photograph of a well-kept garden; below, on a round support, is a sculpture representing three hares fastened together by the ears. Opposite, we come across a mirror low above the floor and a kaleidoscope. The hare is a symbol of fear; the legend having it sleep with its eyes open also makes it a symbol of watching. The symbolism of three hares in the round window of Padeborn Cathedral lies in the figure emerging as a result of their linked up ears so that they come to represent the Holy Trinity. The circle they make may also symbolise the revolution of time and the short span of life. Our response to the objects listed above is not as strong as to the other works on show, their appeal is much gentler. They mark the closing and the opening; the beginning and the end of the whole exhibition.Stuart Morgan has written that there may only be one principle to which an artist without an established style, material or medium should subscribe, and this is an absence of principles, in any case irrefutable principles. It may well be that solutions come in the wake of the refutation.9 In Piotr Kurka’s work, this principle amounts to reaching for various materials and objects appealing to his imagination like splinters of a broken world or fetishes or amulets gifted with peculiar power. The most characteristic of these are dolls, dogs and vessels, all in varying sizes. Operating used, second-hand , second-hand objects, Kurka does not only alter their material qualities, but also our field of vision. At times, he goes further than this, offering us a peculiar kind of mystification. he himself produces objects that he could find in a junk shop if he were lucky. At other times, he makes references to familiar objects, to toys like the teddy bear, here made of bronze, an important element, to which other objects used in the installation, optically much heavier than it, owe their balance.There is tension in many of Piotr Kurka’s works, and he constructs it in various ways. It may be connected with balance, as in the case of a dog with walking stick on its nose, or in the case of the teddy bear. The silvery tear featuring in the Białystok installation is a source of a different type of tension. In this case, we feel the weight of a ripe fruit that is about to fall. Here there is something swollen and ambiguous in it. There is a different type of tension, resulting from the unreleased energy of strings featuring in works like La maison de poète and When you keep crying… The sharp vertical line, the direction of which concurs with that of gravity, is occasionally balanced by motifs of a circle or revolution round an inner axis after the pattern of planets, the sequence of days and nights symbolised by the Sun and the Moon, ebbs and flows, finally, the spontaneous emergence of images in the revolving tube of a kaleidoscope. When we have a feeling we are hot on the trail of a definable narrative, tale or anecdote, we discover that they exist only within us, in our misty apprehensions.That Piotr Kurka’s objects may seem anachronistic, is the result of stylisation. Anachronistic, or incompatible with their time, they are also homeless because they do not belong in any other time. By depriving them of evident references to a definite place and time, the artist makes us think they have been quoted from our dreams. And, as in dreams, there is only one binding principle, that is a lack of principles. Nothing is certain and the archetypal and symbolic motifs prompted to us turn out to be misleading.translated by Joanna HolzmanText originally published in the exhibition catalogue “Piotr Kurka. Konflikt między dobrem a złem jest chorobą umysłu” [Conflict between good and evil is mental illness], Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, 2001Notes1 Louise Bourgeois, Deconstruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father, MIT Press Cambridge, 1998, p. 2322 Stuart Morgan, Z notatnika kamerdynera sztuki [From the Diary of an Art Butler], Gdańsk, 1997, p. 1393 The Collected Works of BRUNO SCHULZ, ‘Tailors’ Dummies’, London 1998, p. 32 (transl. Celina Wieniewska)4 Latitudes, exhibition catalogue, Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow 1999, p. 235 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment [Polish edition, Cudowne i pożyteczne, Warsaw 1985, p. 151]6 The Collected Works of BRUNO SCHULZ, pp. 34, 357 Latitudes, exhibition catalogue, p. 238 Stuart Morgan, cit., p. 1379 Stuart Morgan, cit., p. 126
