Art Reviews: Montreal, New York, Your Town.

Kamila Wozniakowska`s show at Musée D`Art Contemporain is actually part of a double bill with Dominique Blain, and if one thing rings between both artists`s works is that they`re each engaged at revealing how we`ve been living in an harsh and unfair world filled with violence and injustice.

Except that, contrary to Blain, and this is what you can fathom from the title of the exhibit "Le Monde Comme Il Va" (The World As It Goes), Wozniakowska is not pointing any fingers at anything but rather proposes distanced, cynical allegories merely depicting the world "as it is, and always have been", meaning that, it`s vile and hopeless as ever, and that the artist is not seeking to provoke any sort of moralist reaction in the viewer`s mind. To put it bluntly: if you happen to be a war criminal, Dominique Blain may succeed at making you tremble of guilt exactly for what you did, but Wozniakowska will rather make you smile thinking that we live in such a rotten world anyway, that seen from remote, human nature is so intrinsically violent, that you may end up leaving the exhibit just as what you were when you first entered it.

In reaction: though I understand the interest of making these two shows respond to each others, I believe that Wozniakowska should have been installed "beside" the Dominique Blain and not "following" it, because the spectator could as well be leaving the museum taking for granted whatever Blain`s was trying to upset about human violence.


Does that mean that Kamila Wozniakowska is herself a bad, mean, and evil person ? Not at all !! It just means her work is more broader and philosophic. Her aim is to portray us as we are, and if it is any shocking than great, as we are free to alterate our lives, but the artist doesn`t oblige you in any direction. Or rather, if you "choose evil", than she will make fun of you, revealing the ridicule in your violence instead of categorically convey what she finds "upsetting" about it, and it`s through this position that Kamilla somewhere underneath still guides the viewer`s morality.

(yeah I know...my reviews are weird......)

The paintings are technically impressive. For an artist who originated from Poland, most of her work looks brittish, from a reminiscing Francis Bacon in the early pieces (though I could also imagined them on local walls of any eastern europa taverns and breweries), to the teabox (or teabiscuit box) graphic vignette style of the classically informed later works (that seem to reflect both the vernacular and purely classical style of such period painting, but the way they are cut in vignettes made me think of old tin box designs). The artist is well-organized in her researches as her style unfolds and develops in precise corpuses over the years. There is one constant: the serial vignette, or slightly altered repetitive frame, which led to a multiplicity of graphic matching canvases when she decided to move out of the single composite. We`ll try to ponder how these evolutions guided the interpretation of her work, which followed similar socio-conflictive themes throughout all her career.


1990-1993: bavarian tavern fights.

Ok...my appellations are silly. The works doesn`t necessarely represent fights (though we may infer it from the later works), but rather can be read metaphorically as tensions between various bodies, the same way we detect bodies on top of each others in Betty Goodwin`s paintings. They are as sensual as they are violent, and the figurative style is both expressionist and grotesque. Bodies seems to melt one into another, and the bizarre image I had in mind was that they were depicting medieval drunkards in such "eastern tavern" poses, (I`m saying this just cos many are painted on old wood panels (or rather, planks), using similar dark colours backgrounds as eastern european medieval icons, and some of these bodies look like boars or packs, and I gave me the permission to compared them with neo-medieval shop panels of such exotic origin), when we are not sure if the bodies are in tense of fight or if they are merely supporting each others. Truth is I`ve seen some of these paints long ago ("Portrait Équestre" (1990), a title referring to animality, "La Concorde" (1993), which seems to ironise peace, "Modus Vivendi" (1992), "Suite Mythologique" (1993)) in an early collective show, and in fact I was already much impressed (true, true, I got old notebooks somewhere) that I can remember exactly where: it was in "L`École De Montreal", a group show at Maison de la Culture Plateau Mont-Royal, and it`s good if I can remember any other artist from it. I remember how they retained my attention for demonstrating such a crystallization of human`s animality and violence (they looked really raw back then, "Goyaesque", as Stephane Aquin referred to them, if I`m less easily impressed today). Ackwardly, since then I had never seen anything else from this artist except from her various participations in Musée d`Art contemporain de Montréal group shows (who seemed to have jumped on her early on), and her public work on Laurier street on the facade of the National Theatre School. I`m discovering much of it all here. The series of 21 ink vignettes "Figures Pour Mes Amis Qui Boivent, Mentent Et Me Volent" (figures for my friends who drink, lie, and steal me, 1992) , each containing 4 drawings loosely influenced by passages of Marquis De Sade antimoralist "Philosophie Du Boudoir", is the most surreal and abstract piece of anything shown in here, and where I got this idea of the "boar" above, which is one of the recurrent motif, amongst enumerations of bottles, drunkards, and various other items or bodies (human and animal) "gaping" into each others (as in the previous "Portrait Collectif En Pied", 1991, that seems to have influenced this serie). From this very complex and bizarre ensemble of tiny works (expect being exhausted at scrutinizing them), we get the essence of what was going to form the major characteristic of Kamila`s work: the repetitive cases, complementing or enforcing a singular figure or "idea", like in a formula or film storyboard, deblatering on a major philosophical debate about the inner "bads" of mankind. Such other rough-edged works from the "early" period as "Colloque Particulier" (1993) or "Argumentation Logique" (1993) entices at reading them as sarcastic philosophical ironies through their judicious titles.


1992-1995: Wrestling Duos And Quatuors.

The "epuration" of Wozniakowska`s style happens here, with the canvas keeping toward small size, and the figures really looking like fighting characters (their contours slightly shifting from the roughness of the early works), and most importantly, the works come in fragments of 2 or 4 frames, what really confirmed the artist`s interest of exploring the multiple views of one scene, the characters (here still anonymous) often shifting place from one another (so that you can`t spot any winner in these combats, the focus is really on the fight itself, as a constant formula). "Vol Qualifié, Vol Qualifié (Bis)" (1992), which its repetitive title, best represents these energic, often red backgrounded, self-inflamatory tableaux. "Extorsion De L`argent" (1994) and "Extorsion De La Promesse" (1994) are each series of 4 little square paints sharing similar fighting motifs than on the previous "Suite Mythologique" (1993) shown next to them, but this time we are away from the mytho-poeic and fully engaged in adressing the subject as both permanent and contemporary. The multiple framing plays a trick with narrative in that it demonstrates how events move through time but there is never any shift in ideas: actions are merely repeated ad infinitum.


1996-1999: Repetitive Tinbox Vignettes Depicting Absurd Acts Of Affection, Condescension And Violence.

This is the major portion of the show, including the "typical" work that is now recognized as the signature of the artist, these grand canvases formed by series of repetitive theatrical vignettes in which characters (now academically drawn and recognizeable, using what Nicolas Mavriakis from Voir refers to as "pre-modern pictural codes") are shown in various and inter-relationnal "dynamics", over an exact same background landscape (looking like mechanical reproductions, but actually painted one by one, pondering our notion of the singular painting versus the series). The choice of figures may be either completely anonymous, or depict precisely sourced material (often of remote origin), but they all convey similar topics about parading or enumerating the absurd poses of their subjects in various contexts of human tension, as a whole proposed as allegories on social relations. The titles are pretty self-explicit, such as "Saint Sebastian Receiving Unsolicited Advice On A Professional Martyrdom" (1999), which presents 12 vignettes of an anonymous contemporary personnage comically mimmicking to deadpan Saint Sebastian the various effective ways to express suffering, or "El Matador Practising Being Disturbed By An Unidentified Activist" (1998), an hilarious series of 28 (4 times 7) vignettes of a matador really getting annoyed by some geek in a quantity of imaginative positions over a grey empty background. Both these works implement the caricatural vision of the artist, using humor to better ridicule the inherent tensive dramas in every human negociations. Characters as a matador or a saint are used because they are charged with psychological clichés, such as impassivity and passivity. Sometimes animals are included, like in "A Hunting Hound With Two Travelling Salesmen On The Meadow" (1998), where two men are pulling 16 variations of grimaces in front of an inimpressible dog, a painting that better expresses the surreal and vain animosity of mankind. But the "inherent human drama of social tense" is getting a little more ambiguous and uncomforting in the anonymous works, like "Corrigé Pour La Postérité" (1997) or "Character Assassination" (1996), where in both a threesome (the smallest social cell when problems usually start to occur) are replicated into extravagant poses of mixmatch relations (example: a character kisses another that is being punched by a third one, or they all tangle in triangle). These works, often focussing on one character being abused by the two others (as though to expose that in life hell is "always the others"), made me think of the performative work of John Wood And Paul Harrison when they aren`t using props but defying gravity laws with each others body. The first one of these tableaux is technically interesting for the way the characters are enacting in blurried impositions under the firm lined bodies that never alter but keep their position within all 8 vignettes. If people had never got it before, now it is clear that these formal "fights" are presented as metaphorical to human psychology (if not philosophy). They represent the secret tensions hided in each of us, when we meet one another. They also represent how society is being built as some sort of kid games about power, as evidenced by the 12 vignettes in "A Commissar, A Squire, And Others In The Countryside" (1998), which adds an alteration of the size of the 5 or so characters in order to better applicate a comment on the chaos of hierarchy in social tensions. But this said, the interpretation is always left open because never anyone seems to be ever winning anything in all these fights, which are eternal and endless, such of what the artist reached her best at communicating in "Two Mortal Enemies Seen From A Distance" (1999) which will seem at first less technically impressive and self-erasing from the lot but actually judiciously examplifies the distance the artist is engaging when depicting acts of human violence (physical or psychological). When all is reduced to the size of ants across vast arid landcapes, these human behaviors only seem ridicule and emptied of any valuable meaning.


The Year 2000: Blueblooded Historico-farcical Paintings Encounters (Trilogies).

This time the artist experiments with a couple new things, following 3 precise parameters (and it`s a coincidence that these works all consist of 3 equal sized canvases aligned in row): 1 - monochromatic painting (which by the choice of blue only enticed my impression that they look like another century`s tinkerbox vignettes, or english porcelain plate designs by now if you will), 2 - choice of historical figures and reference to precise works of art and style, 3 - confirmed use of narrative effect (stories are told with beginnings and ends). I am not certain of the aims and reasons for all of this corpus though. These intellectual farces are getting a little too specific and lousily adressed. Both "Avant Et Après (Scène D`Intérieur Avec La Référence Et L`Artiste- Interprète)" (2000) and "Avant Et Après (Scène D`Extérieur Avec Le Roi Et Le Révolutionnaire)" (2000) are presenting blueblooded versions of Velasquez`s "Pope Innocent X" (1650) or Rigaud`s "Portrait Of Louis XIV" (1694) in "before and after" conditions, the first after being "fucked" in bed by some guy that looked like a contemporary politician, but judging from the decomposing version in the third canvase, we infer that it was Francis Bacon (he reworked that painting) making out with Velasquez, and the second is presenting the Louis XIV after shifting or gaping clothes and faces with what seemed at first like a religious David but turned out to be..haha...Jacques-Louis David`s (the great classical painter) version of Marat (!), the revolutionary intellectual of the French Revolution (hey..I didn`t remember what that looked like). What was the point of these contemporary re-reading of Louis XIV and french Revolution ?? Maybe we are lacking the context of a Parisian exhibit ?? Something about demonstrating how violence is the constant wrether it is for the good or bad ?? I really don`t know. These works are "decoratively" beautiful, nonetheless. In "Avant Et Après (Scène D`Intérieur)" (2000), we get a crude clue of what these other works might be about. It`s basically an 18th century style series showing a man and a woman in a room before, during, and after the act of fuck (oh..don`t feel so shocked, tons of similar erotic paintings were executed during that era). The couple, are in near exact positions in first and third paintings, but their facial expressions have changed: in the first the man ask a favor to the woman, in the final the woman ask a favor to the man. The world spins but not much ever changes when in actions we`re all the same.


2001-2002: Vignettes Of Brecht Characters In Poor And High Resolution.

This corpus was the focus of a precised research, based on the exploration of characters-symbols created by Bertold Brecht for his version of Threepenny Opera (1928). The subject may seem a little outbound and remote, but Wozkanikowska thought of a judicious trick to link the contemporary with Brecht`s "alienating effect" notions. First, she returned to the use of multiple theatrical-storyboard vignettes aligned on one canvas, depicting various moments of "alienation" of the characters in poses that support their theatrical identities, as crude as "crude thinking is the thinking of great men" (Brecht), but then she replicated these canvases in two quasi-identical versions, of "low" and "high" resolutions, meaning that she added a typical victorian british "tinbox" miniature city background (the stage of Beggars`s Opera) in full color over the grey emptied background of the "poorer" versions. In "Peachum, Version 12k", "Peachum, Version 24k", "Macheath, Version 14K" and "Macheath, Version 28k" (all 2001-2002), we get eight sections of Peachum stealing each time a different part of a costume or nine sections of Macheath running to hit the head of the other fellow with different tools, both those scenes exactly replicated in their full color format. The corpus is highly theoretical, and it would be long to discuss all the spheres it is implying, but suffice to say it complements Brecht`s discourse very well, interested by the exploration of general social motifs rather than precise psychological characters, and by getting away from make-believe rather than ornementing with precise socio-historical contexts. Here, the works titled using the terms of computer digital imagery, also send hints about hyperrealist theories (is the world we live in simply just the illusion of the best that it could be??). Both "Jenny, Macheath And Peachum, Version 15k" (2001-2002) and "Jenny, Macheath And Peachum, Version 30k" (2001-2002) present the same 6 theatrical vignettes resuming allegorically the whole play of Threepenny Opera, but presented in their anti-realist and hyper-realist "resolution" formats. Touché! But I`m sure most people won`t get it. It`s really a work made for art snobs to enjoy, but quite pristine in execution.


2003 To Today: Tryptic Allegories On Artistic Life.

According to my usual impression that artists given a chance to exhibit in large museums often take this opportunity to communicate their views and opinions about the art world, the final section of the show presents all new works dealing humoristically about the absurdities of living a life as an artist. Again, the distanced view of using older forms of figures borrowed from classical painting (apparently, sarcastically influenced by french Enlightment), and this time all the works share a similar pattern: they`re each tryptics of 3 canvases showing slight variations of one image over 3 different sizes (a trick also used in more abstract form by Damien Hirst seen in some recent popular auctions). In "Deux Théoriciennes Tentant D`Appliquer La Théorie De L`Art Actuellement En Vigueur" (Two theoricians attempting to apply the theory of current art practice, 2003), two french court women and a little dog are shown in three different symmetrical positions, and it looks like this is a humoristic view on post-modernist perspectivism (that the art`s meaning always shifts depending on where you`re at). Actually, I`m not sure, all I can say is that the work is lavish and I was really frustrated that it wasn`t included in the catalogue. "Groupes D`Artistes Autonomes Attendant Les Directives" (autonomous artist group waiting for directives, 2003) is another exhilirating tryptic on which court women throw an harlequin into the air on a drape, a scene duplicated one time per canvas, in symmetrically opposite positions. I`m not sure if the clowns symbolize the "art", that the women await to be evaluated by authorities without too much knowing what to do with it, or simply the "fun" they`re all having while they don`t need to think about art (cos they`re waiting for directives by Mr. King, you know?). At any rates, it`s a joyful image that expresses something about art communities, fun, idleness, and survival away from the powers of those who make all decisions for the art word. The three other works imply the artist herself: "Visite D`Un Artiste Incognito, De Trois Personnes Travaillant dans Les Arts Et Du Sewing Circle" (2003) is showing a similar "shot" from the back of a canvase, that is seen from three different "visitors", which implies that meaning will be inferred differently on the hidden work depending on the reasons and backgrounds that these "visitors" came from, each a motif borrowed from three landmark paintings (but I didn`t recognize them all, I`m too uneducated), their level of implications perhaps evocated by the shift in size. By this time I`m having sheer fun, cus even though these theories have been discussed in art since the 60`s and been rehashed many times by artists (and we still don`t get it...), I still think it`s fair that once in a while an artist reminds us about the tricks and games of art theory, on both representative and interpretative level, and Wozniakowska here seems to be crossing these commonly accepted points nicely ("cleverly" the educated journalist will say) . "Visite Pour M`Apporter Quelques Précisions À Mon Sujet" (2003) is another ackward visit of two classical frenchmen, monochromatic, looking like one is the theatrical smiling guy and the other the bad mood guy. They sit next to a table and seem to directly adress the audient. The work seems to figure the artist`s constant duality of dealing in between light humor and dark subject. "De Mon Apport Dans La Pratique De L`Art" (Of what I am bringing into art practice, 2003) seems like filled with anxiety, as a monochromatic grey contemporary painter is looking nervously toward a colored french classic painter, as though envying his inspiration: art of today is dauntingly free of bounds and artists often feel lost as they are no common theoretical grounds, while artists of yesterday knew exactly what the art of their time`s agenda was and what they had to do. Theoretically I may not be getting all these works right, I feel I`m lacking research and right now I just feel too lazy to open books. But I wonder if I should care since technically, I`ve been already entertained by them (and what is art theory but a rhetorical (intellectual) form of entertainment?).


Perhaps Wozniakowska is an artist more important than we realize, her style is unique and hard to compare. It uses tricks of pop art, minimalist art and classical art, often proposing through them surrealistic and oniristic encounters, but the work is primarely conceptual and philosophical. It`s culturally charged or informed but yet very entertaining even to the worst of art neophytes. It`s a delightful show in the end, we laugh more at the world`s cruelty than being shocked or saddened by it. It`s like cruelty have been proved redundant, this work being all about redundancies. For an instant, by means of art, we were living above them and enjoying ourselves.



Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan


PS: On the other side of the museum rooms was an exhibit of "recent acquisitions" by the museum. Of the 31 one works shown, the only ones I thought were worth buying were: Paterson Ewen "Abstracted Clown" (1995) (cos it`s funny), Anselm Kiefer "Karfunkel Fee" (1990) (cos it`s majestuous), Roland Brener "House Of Digital" (1997-99, 3 parts) (cos it`s twisted and clever), Nam June Paik "Structural - Something - Please Add A Noun" (1975) (cos it`s funny), Betty Goodwin "La Mémoire Du Corps" (1992) (cos it`s sacred art), Monique Mongeau "Acacia" (1996) (cos it`s beautiful), Nicilas Baier "Nourriture / Vaisselle" (cos Baier`s big, you know), Roberto Pellegrinuzzi "Cible / Paysage IV" (2001) (cos it`s beautiful). I thought that Michel Goulet, Roland Poulin and Rober Racine were each capable of better works. The rest is all stuff I didn`t care for (or didn`t understand, that is always a possibility).