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Painter’s Painting
Leung Ka-Lun Talks to Wojciech Gilewicz
Artist Wojciech Gilewicz carries his easel around the world and paints in front of the crowd at various iconic spaces and stereotyped landscapes. We could never tell his attempt having any success though.
Leung Ka-Lun: Is using video the original idea of this work or does it start as a public performance where the video is a recording of the performance?
Wojciech Gilewicz: Painter's Painting is a video project. It has always been one. It started with a very simple and clear idea, which did not evolve much with time. The only aspect of the piece I was not aware at the beginning was the importance of a good editing of the footage. But as the piece developed in time I was able to make better selection of clips and compose the whole video in a way that while you see the endless repetition of the action (painter painting a painting) you do not get bored that easily because this same repetitive action of painting is superposed on the quite surprising diversity of the surroundings, which makes this action nearly disappear in the settings where it takes place.
Leung Ka-Lun: The video is filmed in very diverse locations, from scenic landscape & historical site where painter used to paint there traditionally, to advertising billboard, museum or gallery where the painting action itself become an ironic action. How do you choose the location to be filmed? Are they more like happening events?
Wojciech Gilewicz: When selecting locations for the footage I do not have any kind of script or ideas beforehand. It's more of an intuitive pick of spots when travelling somewhere. I want to create this mini-story where the narration is fragmented and clips are not directly linked to each other. The piece was shown already on a few in different museums and galleries, and the funny thing is that what might look exotic for example for the Korean audience is quite ordinary for the Polish one, and the opposite, making this video a sort of an actor enabling exchanges in cultural and visual experiences.
Leung Ka-Lun: I am well aware of the cultural exchange issue and also the viewing experience. When I first watched this piece at the Media Art Biennale WRO 2015, It was a very self-reflexive experience, because while I was looking at the audience inside your video who tried to understand what you were painting, I was also watching other artworks in the reality. I felt like I was one of the audiences that try to make a logical connection to the world through looking at what the others were doing. I think this is also one of the reasons I would like to screen the work online specifically, to question whether the global glance experience over the internet provides an effective way to understand the global issue or in fact homogenized them. I think the online viewing experience is interesting for the fact that we tend to skip repetitive material and stop when we grab what fulfil our original intention. How do you think the online viewing of your work or artistic video in general? Are you usually reluctant to do that? As many of your work concern the reaction of the audience, have you ever performed through live-stream video?
Wojciech Gilewicz: I have to say that I'm rather reluctant to show my works on the Internet. I came from the painting tradition and using a video camera now still has some of these qualities I've learned while studying painting. It's hard really to translate those nuances into a smartphone screen which is now a common device to search the Internet and watch things on it when always on the go. The other reason is that as much as I'm transitioning my practice now from painting to video it is still very much rooted in the "gallery" or "museum" context. It happened to me a couple of times that after being posted on the Internet was not likely to be shown in the gallery or museum.
As for the second part of your question I have to be very specific. If we talk about my painting practice I would not mind to live-stream the project. I actually could have been really interested to see a project like "Sale" or "New Paintings" being streamed on the Internet. But things are different with video "production". Since I almost never work with a crew, myself being responsible for everything, not performing in front of invited audiences but the regular crowd of people on the streets gives me the comfort of unlimited time to work on a given shoot or piece. If I need to do several shots of the same frame I just do it not thinking of the broad audience watching the same thing over and over again. Also, I prefer to be "one of them" and not to perform "in front of them". Performing is also for me like leaving your own self a bit and I would like to hide this transformation.
Leung Ka-lun: Is it still an ongoing video performance that you still keep working on?
Wojciech Gilewicz: The piece is almost done. I still have maybe two or three ideas for shoots to be possibly included in it, but even without them I consider the video to be finished. I've been working on it for a couple of years now after all. On the other hand I love unfinished projects... When travelling on my art-related trips I still carry on the easel and my painting clothes with me. At the end of 2016 I went to Iran I found the footage I made there really refreshing and decided to include it in the piece. The idea of this "Painter's Painting" video is really open, you can imagine endless changes to it, some more edits and additional shootings taking place around the world. But as for the gallery or museum presentation I think that 5 minutes-long fragment (the video is 21-minutes long in total now) is good enough for the viewer to get a good sense of the whole piece since its construction is quite simple and repetitive and consists of: a place or a situation, a painter and a painting which is actually never reviled to the viewer.
Leung Ka-Lun: The film raises many questions, both historical & sociological, as well as to the medium and the spectators' gaze, to me it is a very rich piece with lots of access points, but at the same time you seem to place an ironic statement that understanding the world through art is somewhat impossible. How do you see painting as a medium nowadays when art is becoming more and more socially engaged?
Wojciech Gilewicz: If I were to make my own statement about this work I would say that most of the time the reality itself is so much more interesting that we do not really need a painting (or art in general) to describe it for us. We should just look around us, truly become a part of what we see. Experience it. So you are quite right I believe in seeing this video as a kind of my "giving-up-with-art". But at the same time I'm not sure if I would be able to construct this piece without the figure of a painter. The presence of this figure makes you think about all those references to the medium of painting in the history of art, different visual cultures, the global world we live in nowadays, etc. So as much as the painter on the screen might be somehow old-fashioned. (who paints like that nowadays?!) He, or it's better to say his presence, tells you something about the modern world and its complexity. I think that thanks to some humor in the piece, it keeps the right balance between artistic representation of the world and the world as it is.
Leung Ka-Lun: Could you tell me a bit about the current project you are working on?
Wojciech Gilewicz: I have just finished Sculptures video which aims to rethink, in rather a provocative, ironical, but at the same time quite funny way, the role of sculptural representations in the public realm in different places and contexts. While often decorating or aspiring to decorate, they are in fact simply objects in public space funded by local governments or businesses showing off, or manifesting their power by shaping popular aesthetics. Therefore often giving to the general public quite a false perception of what sculpture is, and how it should, or could be interpreted.
This summer of 2017 I also launched a small residency program in The Rockaways, Queens, New York, where I live, which is called Beach64retreat. Working on pieces like Painter's Painting or Sculptures I travelled really a lot. I met many people and most of the time I was stricken by their hospitality and kindness. My travels to Asia or Iran were kind of life-changing experiences for me... Retreat is my way to give back in a sense. We invite people broadly connected with arts & culture to our house in The Rockaways. It's a peninsula, located between the Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic Ocean on a NYC subway line, just two stops after JFK airport. Of course it's a tiny, kind of grass root initiative but the idea behind it was just to simply give back what I got from people while traveling as an artist to work on my projects. With a small downsizing and reconfiguration of the floor plan we were able to separate an independent one- bedroom apartment where we invite people to come and stay. We are not applying for grants to run the retreat. It's our small contribution to the society, to the arts & culture world. We would rather want Beach64retreat to stay small and independent kind of self-run initiative. I think it's a perfect time now to do such projects. The political climate for contemporary culture for example in Poland is really bad; budgets are limited and more and more restricted so that artists cannot support their projects through grants anymore. The same is happening in the U.S. I think it's a time to rethink if the art production should really be always connected with money. Maybe actually "going small" is what we need, at least for now. For instance, everyone has a camera after all, and we all, no matter our professions, are creating images and videos. We are all artists in a way.
Wojciech Gilewicz (b. 1974) is New York-based artist born in Poland. Gilewicz draws on his experience of the painting medium to create formally varied works that seek to investigate the boundaries of art and space. In his recording of reality, the camera itself fluidly transforms into a means of registering social relations, which take place ‘outside’ his actions. His solo exhibitions include Cuboids, Cuchifritos, New York, USA (2015); Rockaway, Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, Poland (2015); Painter’s Painting, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Taiwan (2013); and Front Room: Wojciech Gilewicz, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Saint Louis, USA (2008). His group exhibitions include The Travelers, KUMU Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia (2017); Seven, The Boiler / Momenta Art, New York. USA (2014); Queens International, Queens Museum, New York, USA (2013); Factory, Museums of Bat Yam, Israel (2009); and In Practice, SculptureCenter, New York, USA (2009).
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Painter’s Painting. Some Thoughts on the Recent Works of Wojciech Gilewicz
Dorota Czerner & Russell Richardson
The Painter’s Painting?
Is this the Platonic Painter that all painters aspire to emulate?
Is this the one painter that this painter (Wojciech Gilewicz) embodies?
Is this his, Wojciech Gilewicz’s, attempt to embody Everyman (the Painter)?
Or to efface himself?
And ‘Painting’?
Is that the action of putting paint on a canvas?
Or the resulting artifact?
Or the sum total of the paintings the painter paints?
For ‘Painter’, read ‘Artist’. For ‘Artist’, Read ‘Human’.
Or is Gilewicz both subject and object?
Subject, medium, and object.
In the last days of May 2016 we met up outside the Cuchifritos Gallery with Wojciech Gilewicz, and Bartek Remisko – the curator of the artist’s most recent solo show, “Cuboids” – inside the Essex Street Market in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It took us three hours to travel down from upstate New York. But it took Wojciech and Bartek nearly half that time to travel in by the A train from the Rockaways in the Far East of Queens.
(By the way, Gilewicz’s solo show held in Spring 2015 in the prestigious Foksal Gallery in Warsaw was actually titled “Rockaway”1 ) The notion of New York City being one single place, a single point in space, neglects the whole physical reality of travel. The getting there, being in a bubble, a half-world or zone of uncertainty between tension and boredom, being in a hurry and standing still, whether in a stifling subway carriage or a traffic jam on the FDR East River Drive. Appropriately enough…
Though a painter by training and vocation, Wojciech’s most recent works are video pieces which deal with identity, place, gesture and that peculiarity of travel where the in-between spaces take on their own significant, dominating and particular flavour. The work interrogates this reality. And painting.
WG: “I think that reality (the term itself sounds a little philosophical, or maybe broad, but I like this word because it is ‘normal’) is what we should all care about. Not a simulacrum of reality in the form of art. (Here I wanted to say that we derive greater pleasure from looking at a flower than from looking at a flower in a picture, but I hesitated, because even such simple statements cause far too many problems — well, because, what flower? which artist? What painting? What was the reason/impulse to create this painting? and so on… So we could simplify by stating that art, even this abstract art, always in some sense remains in some relation to reality).”
In unsignalled straight montage, in long static takes, we shift from one anonymous (Asian?) mall, streetcorner, airport or escalator to another. Anodyne, faceless, deracinated slices of idealised eastern-western cityscapes and their peripheries.
Here stands a painter’s easel (unless it’s THE Painter’s easel…), its back facing us, the viewers, the camera, the painter’s eye.
And here is Wojciech Gilewicz himself, discreet, brush in hand, palette grasped in the iconic gesture of The Painter. While all around, people go about their business, behind the painter’s back. The painter concentrates, measures, darts swift strokes (unseen) onto the canvas, paints, looking blankly out not quite in our direction, not quite making eye contact with us. He’s looking beyond us, over behind our shoulder, at the subject of his painting. He works very rapidly.
This sovereign gesture of The Painter is not a new trope – Velasquez used it in his “Meninas”. His real subject was us, the onlookers. Or himself, seen reflected in our gaze.
These works, incidentally, took a period of six years to make, as they were shot only when Gilewicz was travelling on other legitimate business trips as a painter – to his openings and exhibitions in foreign countries, usually on a tight budget, often for very short periods in that internationalized world of the hotel, public transport systems, the interior of jetplanes, and those other dreamlike zones which Gilewicz examines in his work. The painter was also – significantly – always alone. There was no video crew or team of assistants shooting the work or preventing (or causing…) potential incidents with the unaware public. He would simply set up his easel and camera, and begin filming and painting.
We noticed that Gilewicz, though not wearing any kind of uniform, is always attired in similar shades of grey. Asked if this was an attempt at a neutral camouflage, or whether he had some other reasons, he replied:
WG: “Of course, not drawing attention to myself is one reason for the grey. But I also consider that tone of grey to be highly representative of the painter, as if you took every single colour and mixed them up (including white), that’s the colour you would end up with.”
As some of the scenes in the video seem to be shot in Korea, we wondered whether there was any connection to the colour of choice for Korean Zen monks’ robes (this same grey, as opposed to say, a charcoal black in Japan):
WG: “Yes. As a matter of fact, when I was in Seoul, I noticed a shop full of clothing in just this tone, which I am very attracted to. When I went into the shop to examine the clothes, I found it was the place where monks buy their robes.”
Then, suddenly, a cut: we are somewhere else. A new continent. A new night. Wojciech painting another same image. Us, Beyond, Offscreen, but using the same easel. Each new place, one shot. Cut. New place.Do we notice the banality of the locale? Or when we segue into a new empty space in the videowork from 2010, “Visitor”? (Co-incidentally (?) this was also the title of the fictitious musical LP which David Bowie’s alien character Thomas Jerome Newton ‘produced’ in the film “The Man Who Fell To Earth”.) The easel in this work has now disappeared. The Painter remains, now the subject of his own camera’s gaze.
But here, he’s blending in, or trying to. Not pigments on a palette, but himself, his body and meagre traveller’s belongings in these liminal and strangely clean and empty places – stairwells, the walls and doorways of luxury stores at night.
Gilewicz is performing minimal actions, repetitions, really not doing anything, doing nothing. Or to re-parse that phrase – performing nothing. Little loops of gesture. Is he about to make his bed here, in a cardboard box? And this Asian gentleman (Korean? Japanese? Chinese?) seems to be doing the same, a ballet with card. Their gestures mirror. And here, another old man is having difficulty climbing a marble staircase in a pedestrian underpass. By his side, present yet seemingly invisible, Wojciech makes the same hesitant shuffle. Same pauses. The same turn, same struggle to put one foot on the next highest step. Then as the man slowly notices the stranger at his side, Gilewicz slowly turns and descends the step, not acknowledging his sudden visibility. He unrolls his sleeping bag. Neon lights, their shadows. People in the shadows, mirror shadows, shuffling. The tension between the innocent, the familiar and the off-, the eerie. Like a shaman mimicking the shuffle of the buffalo, the better to hobble its gait. The risk being that the shaman will get hobbled himself, by the bison. The dangerous magic of mirroring. Who is the reflection? What are we watching? Who are we, the watchers. The subject leaves the frame. What now? His eye remains. Cut.
WG: “Reality often seems uninteresting so people try to beautify it, bend it, manipulate, interpret… In my view it should be the other way round. Therefore I am very interested in what I call the ‘zero’ situation: when we do not process reality, we do not fabricate its image, but we take it in ‘as is’.”
What is it to travel? To go from A to B? And what of those interstitial zones which are the same everywhere. Designed to be the same in every transitional passage, border, airport gate, waiting room, rest stop, train station, cloned mall, underpass, well-lit doorway at night.
WG: “The effect of the cutting between these very different places and scenes is that while some will seem commonplace to us, others will seem exotic. Yet as the work travels, what is commonplace and what is exotic will change, according to the location of the exhibition and the background of the audience. This shifting of any particular scene from normal to exotic and back again is very intriguing to me.”
And if you stay in these zones, who else is there? And how to interact? This is the modern limbo.
And who is going, who coming, and who returning home?
Home. It is not ‘abroad’ which is the opposite of ‘home’. ‘Abroad’ is, or could be, ‘other’. The opposite of home is the interstitial. Not quite clean, the Americans have a legal term for it: broom-clean, pure function, empty of natives. These zones grow apace, as their temporal corollary grows: delays, postponements, time zone fatigue, security check buffers, well-appointed but closed food courts, transit rides to the destination cities that do not run until 6 a.m. Travellers with all their temporarily necessary objects in black shell-cases on rollers. The sound of small wheels on ridged or stippled rubber. The sudden change in tone as they glide over concrete floors. Automatic trains. Night. It’s cheaper at night. The wait is longer. The automatic loops of sprites in the backgrounds of video games. Walking in circles, bumping into the furniture, too rigid and deliberately made uncomfortable so you cannot sleep on it, gesturing in circles, thinking in circles…
This work is now presented as part of the “The Travellers” exhibition at the Zacheta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw curated by Magdalena Moskalewicz (on view from May 14th to August 21st, 2016) as Gilewicz comes back to Poland, but without ‘returning’. Comes from America, yet without having become fully ‘American’ (which America?). Condemned, by choice and circumstance to that interstitial limbo of visas, Green Cards, Nationalities, Passports, immigration lines. Not a refugee, but neither having a refuge, not seeking refuge.
This back-and-forth brings to mind the endless instances of copying, whether in video, sound, Xerox or the shared gestures and verbal tics across an open culture (open as a can may be opened…) which is now worldwide. Seoul, a copy of New York. Berlin, a copy of Tokyo. Shanghai, a copy of London. All of them variant copies of Heathrow, Schiphol, Okęcie, JFK.
The digital and the electronic have only accelerated these processes, but they have been present and latent with their reflexivity and power to mutate and assimilate throughout human history: Man is a copying animal.
WG: “Perhaps the humor in my work is a disguise for the absurd and the destructions of realism. As I mentioned, however, there is a small issue: I am an artist and artists must produce artifacts. When an artist fails to do so, no one knows about them & their work. In consequence they fall out of the art market, no one wants to deal with an artist who doesn’t produce. Well, of course, such an artist also can’t support himself. Or maybe this humor/irony is only a cover-up for the destruction of art?”
It also seems to us that these new video works continue a line, rigorously pursued for at least the past decade, back to his meticulously painted and repainted objects in his “Cuboids” (2015) and the video thereof presented in June 2016 in the framework of Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the US.; and the strictly literal mimicry and disguising of buildings and sections of urban space which Gilewicz replaced or – better – repaired, with hyperrealist or disguised paintings, and ‘hid’ in plain sight on the city streets in his earlier series “Revitalisations”(2007). These perfect mimics of so-called reality then became transformed into abstract paintings when removed from the streets and placed ‘on display’ in a gallery situation.
We asked Gilewicz if he thought that all these mimetic behaviors, camouflages, imitations and so forth could have something to do with his drive to assimilate when he landed in the US as a young adult? An attempt to fit in? Many fresh immigrants feel the unsettling pressures of the new environment…
“It’s a good question and I don’t really know the answer. But the truth is that I feel pretty good, or happy, wherever I go.”
From canvas to object to place to person, has Wojciech Gilewicz now become his own cuboid? The Painter’s Painting?
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