Hi hotties! I’m back from a trip to Barcelona with my partner Mia. We had a great time, bringing back plenty of lovely memories, a nice fridge magnet and postcards, some vegan Baileys cream and tenth degree sunburn on my shoulders, arms and back! Having shed my former self over the past week, I’m back to talk about uhhhh, this. I have written this intro a few times and not really sure what this letter is actually about, if I had to attribute it to a “theme”. The first two sections are a bit bleak and then we go silly mode again so just take your pick baby.
Content warning for: Death, bodily harm, blood, sexual assault
Others consist of beliefs, I consist of doubts
Polish artist, photographer and sculptor Zdzisław Beksiński (1929-2005) was a creative who refused definition. He rebuked the idea his paintings represented dreamscapes, rejected symbolic meaning, rejected influence or inspiration of any kind. If we were to believe Beksiński, paintings such as the one above, were produced in a sort of plasmic id, a dark centre that responded only to mood, current emotion, an undecipherable internal sense of direction that Beksiński himself did not fully understand, whether he wanted to or not. “There is a certain range of moods I like. Nothing else”.
Beksiński has been called a dystopian surrealist - though he rejects having anything in common with surrealist artists - he has been compared to himself and his former paintings - though he is embarrassed to be associated with any former version of himself, stating “it would be terrible if my opinions were preserved somewhere”. He has rejected the notion of being able to teach anyone anything: “others consist of beliefs, I consist of doubts”. So what to make of this mysterious, deliberately opaque man?
Born in 1929, the artist came of age during the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War Two. By the cultural boom of the 1960s, he was already in his thirties - engaged by the aesthetics and polemics of the times but not as malleable to the radical changes envisioned as his peers. By the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 - a point which Beksiński claims was a period of heightened, albeit short-lived political interest for the artist - the man was approaching old age. The fall of the Soviet Union was not a new dawn for Beksiński, but a sunset.
Beksiński thus lived through prolonged periods of his life perhaps believing that the safest option was to never be associated to anything, to never commit fully to a belief or influence. He’d survived the brutal scrutiny of the Nazi regime, the existential identity politics of the Cold War and spent his final years witnessing the birth of a postmodern age, pregnant with contradiction, where symbols are truths and the truth is a lie and no one knows what anything originally meant.
This is however, all complete conjecture. What I can say, is that whether Beksiński took inspiration from dreams or intended for his work to be seen as such, it has an undeniable dreamlike quality. Landscapes are abstract and endless, figures or objects are removed from the comfort of context, vast architecture is conjured from nothing, heads are sculpted to be familiar but hollow, alien, expressionless. When Beksiński was tragically murdered in 2005, after refusing to loan a friend the equivalent of just $100, he left behind a body of work that refused to give the viewer closure, a reference point or a way out. It instead captured raw, unresolved emotions; of helplessness, of human disconnect, of oblivion.
I am the object
If that wasn’t bleak enough for you, take a look at this. In 1974, now legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic performed Rhythm 0, a six hour public performance in Naples, Italy. Placing seventy-two objects on a long table, Abramovic gave written instructions to the audience:
Instructions.
There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.Performance
I am the object.
During this period I take full responsibility.
From 8pm-2am, Abramovic allowed the public to use any of these items - which included a gun, a bullet, bread, makeup, perfume etc, the full list is here - however they pleased. Things started out ok, people moved Abramovic’s limbs, spun her around, offered her a rose or a kiss. But slowly, things began to escalate
*please scroll past this section if this becomes triggering in any way. I will include a nice picture of a puppy to indicate when the triggering details are over*
as people began to harm Abramovic using the items provided, with razors or with rose thorns. By the end of the performance, someone had taken the gun, pointed it at the artists head and begun to wrap her own finger around the trigger, before being stopped by other more protective members of the audience. One person drank Abramovic’s blood, while others attempted to sexually assault her. The violent chaos was brought to a halt as the performance reached its timed end. Abramovic stood up and walked towards the audience members, who all proceeded to rapidly leave the space, into the darkness of the early Italian morning.
Abramovic’s conclusion from the performance was that “in your own performances you can go very far, but if you leave decisions to the public, you can be killed”. The escalating violence that was itself, ‘performed’ on Abramovic’s body was perhaps perceived as less ‘real’ to some due to the passive nature of the artist and the gallery setting. To use A-level English literature language here, Abramovic acted as a microcosmic site of social interaction, as seen by the factionalism that took place amongst audience members. While some saw the frozen nature of Abramovic’s form as an invitation to alter it, to use it and abuse it, others became protective over her and recognised that the context of the performance did not negate her rights as a human being.
The letter that Abramovic provided acted as the placard that accompanies a painting, establishing the rules for participating in the performance. The gallery, an unpoliced walled in space with limited visibility to the outside (the real) as well as the late night timing of the performance facilitates a space and a moment where violence may have felt more acceptable to those interpreting the objects provided to them. The broad spectrum of dangerous tools provided by Abramovic also may have felt like an invitation to provoke. But of course, none of these explanations can truly account for the near life-threatening level of violence that Abramovic experienced.
What do you think? If this piece was performed again, by a different artist perhaps in a different space, would the result be the same? Are there sociocultural factors at play, that precondition subjects to respond with violence? Even though Abramovic’s performance and the parameters of her research were well-enough defined, the outcome shows how the intention of a performance can refract and distort in the individual gaze of the viewer. As the audience scurried away from the scene they had helped create, I wonder if something reset in their heads, whether they felt different or guilty. Or whether they walked home and fell straight asleep.
Ask Elaine
This entire letter, which is generally about art which rebukes definition, could’ve been attributed to postmodern artists. Artists such as Duchamp (his urinal made a cameo in a previous letter), Warhol or Lichtenstein present low-hanging fruit really. But what about someone who appropriated their works? Someone who, from memory, recreated works by contemporary postmodern artists, with very subtle differences and then sold them? Meet Elaine Frances Sturtevant (1924-2014, good innings if you ask me), an American artist who gained notoriety copying or ‘appropriating’ famous works by artists such as those above. The reception was…mixed. Some artists were rather miffed that Sturtevant was ripping them off, while others saw the irony in it all. Warhol encouraged it, sending Sturtevant some work that she could copy from. When asked about his own technique once, Warhol said “I don’t know, ask Elaine”.
Given much postmodern art was intended to provoke and redefine what art could be, to challenge conventional ideas of art ownership and patronage, the idea of verbatim recreating these works challenged the authenticity of work which already rejected originality. A painting of a soup can, or a painting of a painting of a soup can, what’s the difference? Some got the joke more than others. Sturtevant’s work evolved and in the later stage of her career, incorporating video elements that reacted to the shape-shifting nature of the internet.
During a rare interview with the Walker Art Centre, Sturtevant calls slideshows “medieval” before announcing to the audience that there will be one, subsequently recreating an interview she had conducted years prior, asking the host to read the lines of the prior interview while she “pretends” to be the artist. The interview of an interview becomes a script reading, a performance which grounds the audience in how Sturtevant perceives the art world (which for most of her career had been hostile to her practice) and her own work.
Sturtevant only garnered mainstream attention from galleries such as the MoMA in the later stage of her career, with the retrospective Double Trouble in 2014-15. One permanent piece - the last major installation to be completed - is housed at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris - a truly Sturtevantian recreation of a carnival ghost ride that features, amongst other things, an animatronic depiction of cult actress Devine, looking at some dog shit.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! We’re currently still gearing up for our first ever Rat Depot screening, which is now SOLD OUT! Mia sent off the poster and tickets for printing today, so all that awaits is the day itself. If you missed tickets for this one, don’t worry - we’ll be back in September with another banger. If you’re not in the UK…sorry :/ Maybe we’ll do a virtual watch along at some point down the line. That could be quite sexy actually.
If you’ve enjoyed this letter, consider sharing it, giving it a like or don’t do any of that. It’s your life babes.
Love,
Paulie x