under construction

Dorota Buczkowska, Bez tytułu, 2011, kosmetyki i ołówek na papierze.

In 1970 Larry Gottheim recorded a simple film: an 11-minutes shot of fog clearing from a hillside. Watching The Fog Line we have the impression that nothing is happening, the picture is almost still and we feel like we are watching a photograph more then a movie. Beginning with a mostly white frame the picture gradually changes, and after a while we can see the mountain and walking horses. The movie was shot with a special lens that flattens the image through twin pairs of high-tension wires, which generates a point of reference for the viewer. It is the audience who can create and finish the work, during their viewing process. The image is just a pretext to say something more. Reaymond Foery describes Fog Line: it is a wonderful piece of conceptual art, a stroke along that careful line between wit and wisdom, a melody in which literally every frame is different from every preceding frame (since the fog is always lifting) and the various elements of the composition - trees, animals, vegetation, sky, and, quite importantly, the emulsion, the grain of the film itself - continue to play off one another as do notes in a musical composition. The quality of the light - the tonality of the image itself - adds immeasurably to the mystery and excitement as the work unfolds, the fog lifting, the film running through the gate, the composition static yet the frame itself fluid, dynamic, magnificently kinetic.

A very similar shot was made by Dorota Buczkowska about 40 years later in La Montagne Blanche (2007) and in the Alibi (2010). At first glance, these two films have only slight difference between them, which are mostly based on pixels, colors and resolution. But is it only the impact of time and technique, which are different? Looking at Dorota Buczkowska body of work from its start we can see a long artistic period focused on what I would call simply: “circulation.” In her works there has always been some kind of flow, motion, rotation, repetitiveness occurring on different levels. From the most literal piece entitled Circulation (2004) – a collection of drawings showing complicated installations or characters with various elements precisely combined together. Or in Transfusion (2008) where two transparent air-chairs are linked together with a cord and filled with bloodlike liquid. And again in Aorte (2003)-as a red drainpipe is positioned across the building. Shapes circulate in Maison des Poisons (2005) a group of drawings showing fish-shaped installations with viscerally connected organs and pipes. Circulation is revealed through repetition In Birthday (2004)-where many fetus-like candies were placed on the floor. Structure creates circulation in Climatisation (2006) – a combination of animation, movies and paintings presenting weather maps with their circular lines and shapes.

What is a circulation actually? Something with no end and no beginning, something with no straight line, a constant process of movement or becoming, a state of being or a level, repetition with a variation, an idea, change, a method of artistic work. In a circulation there is also a fear of everything that is stable, or feelings of reluctance towards stability, a place for incident. The present becomes fluid and uncertain because we have been given a while to catch it. There is also an alleged hope (and fear) that nothing exists forever and that change is inherent to everything. If all is in circulation, are we – as the perceiving subject - the point of reference, the crucial element to finish the work? Using circulation as an artistic method calls to mind Merleau-Pontian theory of perception where the perceived object is infused with secret life, and perception as a unity disintegrates and reforms ceaselessly. We shall have only an abstract essence of consciousness as long as we refrain from following the actual movement by which it resumes its own operations at every instant, focusing and concentrating them on an identifiable object, gradually passing from ‘seeing’ to ‘knowing’ and achieving the unity of its own life

This unity is felt rather then known. Materials left gradually in our memory form a base of pictures with individual and yet general correlation. This material and its correlation can exist as something between representation and a thing. Talking in Bergsonian terms: the pictures can exist without being perceived. The picture can also be present without being given-the distance between presence and representation makes matter visible. For Bergson there is a difference between reality and representation. L’image presente, or objective reality, isn’t the same as the representation of the image, as the latter does not have an influence on other pictures. In this way, representation is a possibility of isolation. But is it really? Traditional and rational thinking positioned in conceptual opposition victimize the unconsidered elements and also reject the margins of thinking. But this rejection– whatever it is - leaves a trace. In order to find all lost traces, we have to think in resistance to rational thinking. We have to learn to see in the margins.

Buczkowska’s circulation period slowly transforms into something different. Interror (2008) terrifies us with its cold and very precise measuring involved in the process of creating a bomb. Destruction - as prefix “in” points to - is not directed outside, but inside. The tension makes a blow-up inevitable, and it did blow up. It happened with very strong and total involvement in the installation entitled Entre l'état de la Matière (2008). What we see is a broken rope hanging from the ceiling, and a kind of balloon (a bowl) on the flour with the end of the rope. There is nothing to be added to this work, nothing to be rescued: no movement, no repetition, no circulation. All is there – done and irreversible. The viewer is in the position to just silently witness the tragedy which happened somewhere beyond our sight and time. What we see is merely the past - somehow accepted and tamed. Beginning from this work, the circulation is present, but not as an existing being or an artistic method, rather as an echo of the past, like a melody stuck in our head and we don’t know where its from and why it got there. A later work, a latex sculpture – a multi-bubble like, organic shape-has more precision and determination then confrontation. When touched it is both ugly and soft at the same time. This ambivalence gives the work double meaning - inviting though aloof. Stains (2010) has a similar ambiguity; here we see an enormous quantity of white shirts stained with red wine and hung on the wall with almost pornographic detail in an erotic yet disturbing way. The wine, reminiscent of a playful and relaxed time contrasts with the stained white surfaces resembling blood. However, any pain evoked does not originate from these stains, but rather, the overwhelming quantity and a size of the installation. This scale invites us to forget about erotic as intimate, personal, and individual and makes it something generalized. Maybe it gives pleasure in the same way as we drink the wine… In Love Letters (Orgasm Electroencephalograms)-(2009) there is a common line with no excitement, a process line. Love and orgasm – unsure if there is an equality mark between them – this piece is experienced in a “technical” way. This artistic period of Dorota Buczkowska, I would call a “rational diffusion”, started with Entre l'état de la Matière. There is still a feeling or a memory of circulation, but it doesn’t exist as the work itself. “Rational,” because there is still careful and detailed work behind it, some kind of planned structure, which we cannot fully comprehend, but we know exists. “Diffusion,” because in spite of the rational assumptions, the effect is not rational at all – it breaks the meaning into multiple margins and points. There is no central or dominating meaning – they all function together on the different levels and hierarchies.

When Larry Gottheim shot The Fog Line in 1970, it was during a time of experimentation with conceptual art and the camera. When I see this film, I have the impression that it is somehow auto-referential and more about method and esthetic, then the content. However in Buczkowska’s La Montagne Blanche (2007) and Fog and Alibi projects the method is more “felt” then “about”- always remembering that in different contexts the possibilities of interpretation also change.

The Alibi project fully belongs to rational diffusion. What we see is not happening here, but somewhere else. In a still frame, a stone suddenly moves with the current of the stream. Foam polystyrene snow falls in the mountains and then a mist fills the screen with over expanding white. You have to be really attentive in this absent structure to find a place for the one who observes. Representation in Dorota Buczkowska’s films does not present the image of reality, nor does it exists as its supplement, rather it emerges in the image creating another layer - in the end something, which is impossible to distinguish from what is regarded as natural. Suspending the mythical order of representation and beginning: we can observe one layer after another put together with the silent presence of the camera. Was there anyone behind it? Or where they somewhere else?

Art History tells the story of sight and perceiving in a repetitive narration of domination. In order to brake this cycle, we need to learn to see in a different way. In the various frames presented by Dorota Buczkowska-be it films, drawings, empty visualization-a new method of perception is proposed. A method related to Merleau-Ponty’s thinking on how nothing is more difficult then to know precisely what we see. In an effort to try and know, first you have to learn to perceive. As it is impossible to forget or erase dominating discourse in which we exist, we can, or rather we have to - living in this multilayered reality - find something in opposition to this model. Even if there is no source image, we have to find something that is - if not true- at least important for us. Sketches of the rock may relate to rock or a paper. Foam polystyrene snow flying with the gust of wind appears to be real, and then we are not sure, not only of what is somewhere else, but also of what is here. In Dorota Buczkowska works, time transforms from a line to a circle, not because of repetition, but rather because there is no possibility to mark the place of where a viewer is. Space becomes infinite, it is not closed into one frame of here, but expands into place in general, or reflection about the place and its connected meaning. Sight returns to us and we, as the perceiving subject, become present. Contemporary rewriting of mimesis does not begin in reality, but only in the structure of sight and its relations. The nature/culture dichotomy repeated and sustained by rational discourse, does not fall apart in dialectical play of these concepts, but cracks in welds. What is natural or artificial loses its meaning in relation to what we see; the natural has a structure of the artificial and vice versa. We cannot fully comprehend the logic at it is a matter of combination; the only thing we can do is to be present towards the image. This simple esthetic is both beautiful in itself yet terrifying: Who will write the new history of a sight?

Dorota Buczkowska, Lilith, 2009, video still

Dorota Buczkowska, Lilith, 2009, video still

The fact that Adam and his first wife, Lilith had both been moulded of the same clay,

hung heavily over Lilith’s fate. It was because of it that she would not succumb to her

husband, claiming the same rights as he was enjoying – not least, the right to extatic

carnality. Eve – a woman out of man’s rib – was to be spared that predicament. By the time

Eve came to be, however, Lilith had already been gone from the garden of Eden. Finding

Adam’s company unbearable, she fled, turned demon and as such lived on in the desert. Not

even the three angels dispatched after her could persuade her into coming back.

Amidst the tangle of Biblical ambiguity, Summeric mythology, motives from the Talmud and

shreds of Kabala, there opens a space for utopist narrations of the « pre-legal » sexuality;

narrations of the erotic outside the matrix of authority and therefore, without a hint of

domination. The story of Lilith – a woman of the same clay as a man – leaves plenty of room

for fantastic musings about a body unbound and freed from captivity of gender – about a

body, its social uniform undone.

Dorota Buczkowska’s Lilith - an almost four-minute recording of a ballroom-dancing class

– features snapshots of long, red hair glistening mysteriously and recurrent whiteness of

shoulders. These are very characteristic attributes, evocative of D.G. Rosetti’s Lady Lilith

and with it – of the Victorian femme fatale veiled in a shroud of a narrative style that has

so effectively transformed Adam’s first-wedded wife into an ominous femininity figure. That

tradition found its culmination in the fin de siecle culture, at the turn of the centuries - 19th

and 20th. It assumed a role at the time, of a subliminal warning pointing out clearly that the

figure of a woman - rebellious, defiant and fatal to herself as much as to all the wretched

beings that fall within her range - is indeed a figure of the latter day’s nightmarishness of

ubiquitous emancipation movement.

Lilith is a probe sent to measure the gesture of appropriation of a myth. It explores spaces,

which could have been a shelter to the bodily utopia, if they had not been taken over by

male fears of supremacy deprivation. The red-haired heroine shuns the viewer’s eye, her

slender figure disappears beyond the frame of a screen, leaving no time for the beholder

to realize what kind of gesture has just been made : was it tender ? impatient ? offensive ?

encroaching ? The contour gets more and more vague, as bodies shimmer in the diffused

light. The tale of femme fatale underpinned with fear, lest she should claim her right to

carnal extasy is here revisited as a dream of an alternative eroticism.

Who is Lilith dancing with? Eve? Adam? them both ?...or, may be, alone?

Katarzyna Czeczot

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Setting up the exhibition INTERROR, Czarna 2008.

‘Interror ‘ is a neologism not to be found in Polish or any other language. As a combination of two words; ‘interior’ and ‘terror’ it does, however, ring a familiar bell. It is also the name of a series of Dorota Buczkowska’s works.

The word ‘interior’, among other things, means ‘inland’, a vast wilderness with a hint of mystery, adventure. ‘Terror’ – to stop short of explaining the obvious – has acquired quite a lot of new accuracy nowadays hitting homes, families, cherished values – everyone.

Buczkowska is discrete in suggesting sense. Huśtawki /The Swings , perhaps the best known among the artist’s works has an implicit contradiction in it being distinct and volatile at the same time – the swings are carried by balloons made of black plastic which makes them look like boulders and is reminiscent of the body bags. Apart from that, why is this symbol of erotic adolescence, childhood playfulness, flying away?

If one cannot see clearly, imagination gets turned on. Dorota Buczkowska penetrates the space between the tangible and the imaginary. Interror, although feeds on politics of today, does not do so overtly. It emerges on the verge of the internal, private world and the outside. Each work of the series contains at least two layers of contradictory meaning which results in the unspecified discomfort in the viewer. The artist does not try to deny that the materials she uses may well be misused for evil purposes. Grapes reminiscent of insects’ nests that hang on the wall actually consist of little balls filled with explosives. Malformations on another wall are signs of a disease which struck a lifeless substance. Another work is small chocolate-like bars in little plastic sacks with a recipe for a home-made bomb found on the Internet attached to each of them.

The exhibition at Czarna Gallery has been inspired by the elegant bourgeois staircase of the downtown Warsaw tenement building where it is situated. The white, glossy, marble-like material which covers the whole floor brings to mind the original elegant character. Unlike marble, however, the floor cracks underfoot, while strangely familiar scent hangs in the air. The floor is made of paraffin and in it intertwined are streaks of ground sulphure, saltpeter and coal. Thus, every visitor treading on the ingredients of gun powder, with each step participates in the symbolic re-enactment of the destruction of the world which created the very building but which no longer exists in reality. The demons of the past which so often haunt Polish souls add meaning to the universal tale of crises, uncertainty and loss of ground. The main theme of Dorota Buczkowska’s work is, as it seems, a journey to the roots of our fear during which she tries to touch upon the frailty of life and – eventually – of death.

Setting up the exhibition INTERROR, Czarna 2008.

Dorota Buczkowska’s art demands keen powers of observation on the part of a recipient, as the array of motives and techniques employed in the artist’s subsequent works may dazzle and cause confusion. Her choice of forms is necessarily disquieting as it comprises those carnal to the point of sickness alongside lighter and more volatile forms like the images of fog or balloons floating away across the firmament. In terms of form, her drawings, prints and - most of all – her video productions quite often represent different worlds ranging from seemingly ‘clumsy’ handling and ‘uncertain’ lines on some of her drawings and prints to the barely visible faint animation within a still frame. All in all, any consistency between these projects may not be readily traceable.

A way to account for this dispersion would be to explain it through the fact that it reflects the very nature of reality, which for Dorota Buczkowska has been and remains the solid basis to draw her artistic strength from, the reservoir of soul food and the source of energy for growth. The reality is for her both the inspiration and the material throughout her work. As an artist, she refrains from proposing a final vision of her work, letting it live its own life and develop in accordance with its ambience. The multitude of forms and impressions endows her work with additional expressive potential

Some motives are recurrent: organic nature of a human body, for instance, in light treatment so characteristic for eastern Europe, where she comes from. Circulation is another motive that reappears in the artist’s works; circulation of body fluids juxtaposed against circulation of water in natural landscape or in a hydraulic system. Improperly drawn, fake lay-outs of non-existent buildings pose as engineering drawings – while in fact they are attempts to understand their object as if in a game, in which a player strives continuously to gain control over a given set of elements, or at least to attain capability to convincingly pretend to have one. Little red dots inside the piping, or ‘veins’ relocate with the flow of a liquid, congregate, split, appear and disappear only to start their journey anew. An unexpected ballet of a man carrying a carcass of a praying bird with its wings flung back in a wasted stretch.

There is a great deal of sensitivity and subtlety in those images, which manifests itself incessantly only released in uneven portions, more or less discretely, more or less forcefully, in various degrees of incarnation.

If need be to identify a common denominator to all Dorota Buczkowska’s works, it would have been – liquidity, brimful of which is present in every one of her pieces: a trace of life, essence of movement, fleeting and transient.

Liquidity as symbolic carrier of life is also a carrier of death as it may bring about the total disappearance of things. These images, it seems, remind us that motion is the essence of being and that it may stop at any moment, as it does in nature: wind blows away, fog blurs vision, ice melts.

Dorota Buczkowska generates her images to bestow them upon us as yet another brief moment to prolong the sparse time of indulging in an illusion of having power, exerting control and understanding things – but their volatility - ‘liquidity’ – is a string attached to the gift with a warning that, all in all, it is just an illusion, should anyone felt tempted to live it.

Corinne Cherpantier, April 2005

Director of CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART – SINAGOGUE IN DELME , FRANCE