Love

A Conversation with Ryszard Górecki
Third Way into the Unknown, Wherever You Want To

Stach Szabłowski (SS):

We have many concepts, works, and designs to discuss, especially as we’re talking in the context not only of this exhibition, but of a whole series of exhibitions devoted to your work. First, however, let us outline the background, against which we will see your current work and will try to define your artistic philosophy. How have you found yourself where you currently are? Your biography as an artist, curator, a Berlin-based Polish art-maker, doesn’t read like a typical CV of an art-school graduate doing what he’s been taught to do.

Ryszard Górecki (RG):

That’s true. Already as a student at the Graduate School of Education, what is today the University of Zielona Góra, I was more attracted to painting than to pedagogy, even though we are talking about the early 1980s, which were probably the worst imaginable time for being an artist in Poland.

SS:

And yet instead of a teacher you became an artist?

RG:

Having graduated and nowhere else to live, I returned home to my native Słubice and found a job at the community centre there. I ran an art workshop for children and youth, and after hours of work I was able to use the studio and make art. In 1980, I launched, in the centre’s previously idle spaces, what I called the Provincial Gallery [Galeria Prowincjonalna]; the first exhibitions were those of the young workshop participants. After martial law was lifted, I started showing works, acquired over years and resting in storage, from the collections of the local BWAs [Bureaus of Artistic Exhibitions]. I staged themed and solo exhibitions, showing Hasior and Dwurnik, among others.

SS:

The gallery gained recognition a bit later, after the fall of People’s

Poland.

RG:

In the early 1990s, when Słubice saw the “golden rain” of profits from border trade, we managed to move the gallery to a new space and secure a budget for exhibitions. This made it possible to start a programme of exhibitions devoted to new art in Poland and young art from Berlin.

SS:

Which is the closest metropolis.

RG:

It’s less than a hundred kilometres from Słubice. In the 1990s, most ofthe gallery visitors came from Germany. A number of influential artists today have had their early shows there. The programme attracted young artists and the attention of the art press. The Provincial Gallery became indeed an important address on the map of independent art venues in Poland.

SS:

You were heading straight towards becoming a career curator, and yet you decided to take a somewhat different path. In 1994, you won the Polityka Passport for visual arts – a distinction awarded to artists, not to art professionals.

RG:

Besides earning my living by running a painting workshop at the community centre, and my curatorial practice, which for over twenty years remained a kind of hobby, not officially recognized by the centre’s management, I was actively making my own art. My artistic career – a growing number of solo shows, residencies, the Polityka Passport – started alienating the centre’s frequently changing directors. Throughout the 1990s, the contemporary art scene in Poland generally received more and more recognition from the authorities. In Słubice, however, I was being confronted with personal games reminiscent of the former era and a gradual slashing of the gallery’s budget. In early 2002, I closed the Provincial Gallery, said goodbye to the regular job, and moved to Berlin, starting a new chapter in my life as an independent artist. Interestingly, it was soon after my departure that a series of my major exhibitions took place in Poland, such as Libido at the Ujazdowski Castle CCA in Warsaw or Paint It at the Kronika Bytom.

SS:

We’ve arrived at twenty first-century Berlin, but let’s return for a moment to the 1980s. You said you were studying pedagogy, but felt attracted to painting. Were you a self-taught painter? What did you paint? And what did you view? What were your inspirations, your benchmarks?

RG:

You can say so: I was a self-taught painter. This sounds weird today. My first contact with art was through film posters from a classic period known as the Polish school of poster design. The pedagogical studies in Zielona Góra were a way to avoid military service, and then, I thought, I’d see. What preoccupied me during that time had little to do with the curriculum. With some friends, we persuaded the dorm management to convert an unused backroom into an art studio. At first, those were paintings in a surrealist and metaphorical vein. Later came a fascination with Pop Art and conceptual art.

SS:

Where did you learn from?

RG:

In the mid-1970s, the Graduate School of Pedagogy was still a young institution, with staff shortages, and some of the classes were run by interesting, active artists from larger places like Wrocław or Poznań. After exhibitions or performance festivals, and sometimes also after commercial art jobs in the West, they’d bring to class art books and magazines that we devoured, goggle-eyed. What played a significant role too was “experimental art,” as it was known at the time, which was present in Zielona Góra through the Golden Grape [Złote Grono] biennale.

SS:

And when did you start to be and feel part of this art community? When did you start showing your work?

RG:

In People’s Republic of Poland, I didn’t feel part of the art scene because officially I had no access to it. Without a degree, membership, a card to carry, there are no exhibitions, no fine paints, and so on. It was only in the early 1990s that a new art scene emerged in Poland through the efforts of not only artists, but also gallerists, publishers, and authors. Guild membership and degrees no longer mattered. I had my first significant shows in the early 1990s in Germany and shortly afterwards in Poland. At first at independent spaces, such as the ON Gallery in Poznań, the Koło Gallery in Gdańsk, or the Amfilada in Szczecin.

SS:

I imagine that in the 1980s you had limited access to the official art world – you had no papers and were based in Słubice, which from the perspective of major hubs such as Gdańsk, Warsaw, or even Poznań could seem a place at the end of the world, or at least the end of Poland, which does indeed actually end there. That’s why I’m curious about how you joined the scene; you were already organizing exhibitions in the 1980s, and showing some of the most influential Polish artists at the Provincial Gallery in the 1990s. How did you reach them? Did you do anything like systematic research? And what were you looking for in art – what values, aesthetics, attitudes?

RG:

Already by the early 1980s I had broken the Duchampian “sound barrier” in art and realized that what I was looking for were things that challenged my existing notions and experiences. You look at something and you don’t understand – you must think, inquire. I also realized that sensitivity couldn’t be learned at school, and that art didn’t have to look like the art we already know. My interest in international contemporary art and the exhibitions I saw in West Berlin made me analyze and draw comparisons. The Documenta in Kassel versus the native BW As. Later I was influenced by the programme of the newly launched Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art and the art periodicals Obieg and Magazyn Sztuki, the editors of which I was soon friends with. I wasn’t the only one. New art needed new spaces, which we had to create for ourselves. Within a decade, a network of independent art spaces and galleries, usually artist-run, had emerged. This informal scene developed a kind of shared ethos that yielded friendships and exchanges. The utmost value, I guess, was altruism and a sense that we were doing together something that could change the perception of art in Poland. The invited artists became symbols of those places’ programmes. Through those contacts and friendships I also received invitations to show my work elsewhere.

SS:

In the 1990s, you also had fans among the youngest generation, including the later founders of the Raster Gallery. How did you meet? Did they approach you? Or was it you who approached them?

RG:

They found me, as students then, and were indeed interested in both the Provincial Gallery and my own work.

SS:

You said the 1980s were a particularly unfavourable time for being an artist. The 1990s, in turn, created many opportunities, which you seized too, not least by turning the Provincial Gallery into an important and by no means provincial art hub. One can say that you were able to leverage the opportunities offered by Poland’s democratization and globalization. On the other hand, looking at your art from the turn of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, one can get the impression that you were critical, or at the very least sceptical, about the changes taking place – globalization, for one, or the way the Polish society was being baked into mechanisms of the global neoliberal economy. In the early 2000s, did you consider yourself a beneficiary of the transformation or rather contested it?

RG:

I was happy with the new reality. For example, I no longer had to secure the censor’s approval for each show. But I was watching this reality closely rather than throwing myself uncritically into it. It wasn’t long before I realized what dangers the new system posed for art. However, unlike People’s Republic of Poland’s, the capitalist reality could be openly criticized, influenced, and actively changed. This was impossible before. I had always been interested in the moods of great historical changes, but what was even more interesting for me was finding a formula that against their background would allow me to produce niche but thought -provoking, or actually artistically provocative, facts, such as the painting Happy about the Death of Every Evil Person or the artist’s book Animals in the Warsaw Uprising. In the 1990s, after the demise of the socialist system, I watched curiously as we hedonistically celebrated a new lifestyle. Where there was previously dullness in the shops and streets, a new visual cosmos was now appearing: colourful and, if possible, “poisonously” fluorescent, with all those plotter-cut shop signs: “Bakery & Computers” or “Sophisticated Commerce,” while healers and mystics spoke from the TV. During that period I produced numerous works that were critical or ironic, poster-style. I’m still critical and sceptical today, perhaps even more so than thirty years ago, but in the meanwhile art itself has become globalized, while politicians and advertisers freely exploit irony and studied unpredictability.

SS:

You left Poland when the early, anarchic, “wild” phase of transformation was coming to an end. The second chapter of this grand economic/ cultural reform was beginning – the corporate phase, better organized and more thoroughly globalized. But you were moving to Berlin, a city that could serve as a symbol of artistic globalization. Why did you decide to live and work there?

RG:

I moved to Berlin in early 2002. What the media today call an “international cultural metropolis” was already knocking on the door.

SS:

But you had also experienced a different Berlin, the one from before the fall of the Wall.

RG:

You can say I was historically lucky to have experienced the Wall and seen life on both sides of it. On the western side, in the late 1980s, I was able to see paintings for the first time that I knew from reproductions only, visit exhibitions by Beuys or the Neue Wilde. After the fall of the Wall, the former East German capital saw a cultural and artistic explosion. In the run-down and depopulated downtown quarter, Mitte, artists, gallerists, and independent curators had discovered a true “promised land” of new art. In abandoned shops and manufactories, they were starting galleries and organizing large group shows that would eventually give rise to the Biennale. Art was literally at every corner; to enjoy some peace and quiet, the few permanent residents of Auguststraße would post notices on their doors and in their windows: “This is not a gallery.” I inhaled that air intensely, attending gallery weekends, which drew crowds, and major shows, legendary today, such as Zeitgeist, Metropolis, or Sensation. From the mid-1990s, I also started regularly showing the young Berlin art scene at the Provincial Gallery. Friendships were struck and contacts set up with artists, gallerists, and curators, as well as formal cooperation with German institutions. At the same time, I was increasingly invited as an artist to show my work in Germany and attend residencies. The public and the artists themselves would often jokingly refer to the Provincial Gallery as a “Polish gallery at the outskirts of Berlin.” Once I’d decided to start a new life as an independent artist, I only needed to choose where to go to be in the right place at the right time. Warsaw was a possibility, but I opted for Berlin.

SS:

And how do you view that decision today? You know the Berlin scene inside out, you participate in it as an artist, I know too that are an avid event-goer, viewing a huge number of exhibitions, attending lots of previews and launches. Berlin is considered a paradise for both art enthusiasts and practicing artists. Relatively low living costs, state support for art and artists, and an infinite number of possibilities and opportunities arising in a place where the paths of global curators, gallerists, collectors, and dealers all cross. Is Berlin really such a place, an artistic promised land?

RG:

At first sight it is, for such is the topos of a promised land: to promise. Berlin has always been a hope for those going there. It offers everything that one needs to become a fulfilled artist: from numerous art schools, commercial galleries, collections, and museums, to huge art-supply stores, laboratories, workshops, and companies that realize artists’ designs and cater to their needs. A newcomer may experience something of a dilemma: whether to view and experience first, or to focus on making your own art.

SS:

How do you solve this dilemma?

RG:

I still try to know “what’s up in town,” but I actually go to see only those things that I consider important, or that others consider important and I don’t quite understand. For example, I read or hear about an unknown young painter who has discovered new territories in the historical medium and has been hailed as a new star of the art world. It’s the same with young galleries. Having spent years curating exhibitions as well as being an artist under two political systems and in two countries, I’m also interested in the social context of artistic activity. This interest can be defined in terms of two simple questions. What does it mean to be an artist today, in the contemporary world? And, a bit naively, why do some artists succeed and others do not? As someone who has been based in Berlin for nearly twenty years, I’d say the scene has changed quite a bit. In the 1990s, it was about making art, today it is about making money out of art. Rents have doubled, and thousands of artists from all over the world have discovered the city for itself. State-subsidized studios have been increasingly a distant dream, and press reports like that this month fifty new galleries have been started are a thing of the past. Instead, there have been more and more auction houses, running their own exhibition spaces. Responsible for this is the dynamic of an art market that confines itself to its own elite circle. Dividing the art scene between, on the one hand, artists of the made-in-Hollywood art-industry global network and, on the other, a curatorial reserve, which supplies the ever more numerous and thus increasingly devaluated biennales, both groups enjoy wide media coverage and are able to earn a living from art. On the other side are legions of the “artistic foot soldiers”: the no-names, artists without commercial prospects, international recognition, or media appeal. No one is interested in their art.

SS:

The art world’s dark matter, as Gregory Scholette put it.

RG:

The Berlin art scene is tired and commercialized. It has nothing to do with either morality or democracy; it is a promise. Like all art, in fact. I go to previews and fairs, where I view things and talk to people, trying to find an answer to what I don’t yet understand, Warhol-style a bit, even. I listen to what other artists are saying. It’s constantly buzzing here, which is why Berlin is still the best place for me to work, even if it’s no longer artistic ideas, but real estate and money that define it.

SS:

You are an insightful and at the same time critical observer of various systems – the artistic one, of course, but also the political, economic, and social setup behind art. You not so much polemicize with them as hijack their languages, their codes. In the past, you “appropriated” for your own needs the poetics of teaching aids, advertising and propaganda posters, diagrams, data visualizations, infographics. In spring 2019 you showed your new paintings in the exhibition Villa the End, which you also co-curated. Those works, incorporating elements from outside the genre, had an intriguingly complex structure. Each was built around a kind of objet trouvé, a thing physically unassuming, but carrying a heavy symbolic load. Such as, for example, a pair of plastic bird feet, probably a fragment of a Kinder Surprise toy, embedded in the paint. The caption said you found that piece of plastic above Adolf Hitler’s sleeping room, in his bunker, currently a playground. Could you explain how you develop the works for this new series – and where the formula is going to lead both you and the public?

RG:

These paintings combine elements of artistic everyday life with vestiges of unique and emotional events. I want the at first sight nearly monochromatic painting to speak with a powerful sign, like a logotype, and at the same time to have hidden layers of meaning that, having read the work’s caption (title and medium), the viewer can decipher and discover for themselves. As I have noticed, the moment of this discovery often involves a sense of surprise, disgust, or outright horror. The basis is a primed white canvas, which records random traces of creative processes and of my daily life in the studio.

SS:

You mean like those left on the canvas by your coffee cup? Or drips of paint from other painting projects? So the point of departure is a primed canvas – a painting that, in a way, paints itself; it collects traces on its surface, like a kind of paint-based recording device?

RG:

Yes, at this stage I don’t yet control the process of the making of the picture, its form being determined by the flow of time. Then, for the themes, phenomena, and events that I’m interested in, I try to create a simplified sign, which, as a central element of the composition, serves as a synthesis of the theme and the painting’s idea. Painting, I mix the paint with small elements or microscopic traces of substances that symbolically convey a topos, or dramatic, sometimes tragic events, or that with a critical distance confirm the credibility of the theme. The meaning is completed by the title, which is often an out-of-context philosophical quote, scholarly argument, or aphorism adding an extra level to the piece’s interpretation. What I search for is an image of that which is almost unnoticeable or actually invisible. An image often close to death and melancholy, yet easily recognizable, at home in the forms of contemporary perception. The painting’s credibility is based here on the viewer’s emotional, or actually spiritual, experience. Art and religion have a lot in common. With the difference that it’s not churches and cathedrals that the government sponsors these days, but museums.

SS:

That’s true, the system in which we partake builds museums instead of temples, and instead of holy relics produces a lot of trash and waste, degraded matter. You pick up some of those remnants and embed them in your paintings, a bit like a postmodern Schwitters. In Life Says Yes and No, this post-relic comes in the shape of a piece of a motorcycle boot of a biker killed in an accident. In Even Nothing Leaves Something, you have diluted the paint with water from a place where a sixteen-year-old girl committed suicide. In the painting Tomorrow Will Be a Day Just Like Today, you have sunk in the paint a fragment of the police tape that was used to fence off the scene of the 2016 Christmas-market terror attack in Berlin. In other works, we discover less tangible artefacts. For example, in the caption for The World Has Nothing to Tell Us you say that you have painted it using oil paints, but also “tank exhaust fumes.” How do you paint with tank exhaust fumes? And where did you get them from?

RG:

Exhaust fumes consist mainly of soots, and soot is used to make black pigments, so technologically it fits perfectly. I collected the fumes at the end of the Berlin Air Show, when the tanks exhibited there were loading onto their transport trailers. I didn’t yet know exactly what I’d do with the sooty page of the exhibition catalogue that I’d spontaneously pressed against the tank’s exhaust pipe. It was a similar case with the dead motorcyclist, who had already been taken away, and a fragment of his boot. I was worried that a garbage truck would soon arrive and the tragic remnant would end up at a landfill. I try to maintain a critical distance towards my paintings to avoid pathos, but I think it’s better these pieces of rubber have become part of my painting instead of having been deposed to a garbage dump.

SS:

You also use found objects in works from other series and in their cycles.

RG:

In principle, my objects and works on paper are made using found materials. In the case of objects, those are fragments of furniture, technical devices, office stationery, or construction materials. For works on paper, I use pages from academic publications or fashion catalogues, or food boxes, as in the series Pizza Soldiers. I guess the roots of this kind of practice go back to my childhood. I was born in the so called Regained Lands and I realized quite early on that someone strange had been there before us. Already then I tried to collect the books and newspapers, covered with cryptic writing, that we came across exploring attics and cellars, as well as finds from our juvenile excavations.

SS:

You’ve mentioned Pizza Soldiers, a collage-on-paper series that you’ve continued for some years now, effectively building a phantom army. You collect frozen pizza boxes and cut out shapes of soldiers from them, usually posed so as to suggest their being involved in combat. You only use those parts of the box that show pizza. It’s a tasty dish, but when its image is used to illustrate the figure of a soldier, all those tomatoes, salami slices, sauce, melted mozzarella, and veggies look like one great wound, a mutilated body turned inside out by the explosion of a grenade or a bomb. I once thought about those works in terms of an anti-war statement: here’s the contemporary “cannon meat,” or cannon pizza, rather, the prey of capitalism, which basically feeds on our work, but when it grows really hungry for profit, it switches economic violence for physical one, acquiring an appetite for our bodies, our lives. Today, however, when I look at Pizza Soldiers, I think less of war and more of frozen pizza, the unwholesome, cheap, and fast food that is so often to be found on the tables of the precariat. In fact, the pizza boxes themselves aren’t a by-product of war, but of the daily life of our cities, where people live peacefully, work is in full swing, and rents rise steadily, quite like other social inequalities. One could venture to say that at the current stage of capitalism the system not only produces a whole lot of by-products in the shape of all kinds of food boxes and wrappings, but also turns a large, if not major, part of the populace into a “by-product.” Do you ever eat frozen pizza? Or why, actually, are you building this army of “pizza soldiers”?

RG:

I do eat pizza sometimes, though not frozen pizza. As I already said, paper was the main medium of my artistic prehistory. Already as a kid I was interested in collages and assemblages, in repainting reproductions found in books. With some brief intermissions I’ve continued the practice to this day as a form of everyday activity; a lot is produced and a lot discarded. Thinking in terms of an antiwar statement is very much in order here. I’m a pacifist and the way countries “fight for peace” by intimidating each other, by developing or buying new types of arms, is for me a source of bitter reflection. The idea behind Pizza Soldiers was to mock and dealienate militarism and soldiery, which in the nation-state context are something to be proud of, even to worship, something that is permanently gaining in significance. The formal context matters too, and I like your comparison very much: how such a dead soldier may look like “from inside.” I’ve transposed the omnipresent canon of camouflage in fashion and daily life as a new type of uniform onto the silhouettes of soldiers who’d be pretty much invisible on a pizza plate. In my works I send them usually on all kinds of open-end missions, such as action painting, modern design, or science, or even into outer space. On the other hand, it is usually members of the precariat – the consumers of frozen pizza – who fill the ranks of all professional armies of the world. Neoliberalism turns society into a business: those unwilling or unable to participate in it are often forced to eat leftover pizza out of the trash can.

SS:

Let’s continue on the subject of war, and science too. In fact, the two fields intertwine so closely in the modern order that it is sometimes hard to see where scientific research ends and arms development begins, and vice versa. You’ve been using scientific iconography for years, with many of your works dialoguing with how sciences such as economics, but also physics or chemistry, depict knowledge. I’d also place your book covers in this vein. They comprise an extremely interesting series. Usually they are devoted to a particular, narrowly- defined theme, often from the field of military science. We have, for example, the monographic study Animals in the Warsaw Uprising. The cover features an archival image, showing Warsaw ’44 in the background, already partly ruined, and insurgents in the foreground – some of them mounted on nothing less than a war elephant. Or Religious Ministration in the Contemporary Battlefield. One of my favourites is Ornithology in Nato Service, its cover showing a flock of birds in a vee formation perfectly resembling the shape of an F-117 fighter jet. There are more books; the series is rather varied thematically, but all have been published under the same label, Invisible Sign, and all have the same author, that is, Ryszard Górecki. At a time when populism is one the rise, we can expect less and less from both media and politics – both have been increasingly unserious, clownish, and, worse still, full of disinformation. But what about science? The books that you fabricate seem to resonate with the, triumphant recently, aesthetics of fake news, conspiracy theories, alternative knowledge. And resonate doubly, for not only do the subjects of these publications verge on the absurd, but in reality neither the publications nor the publishing company exist; only the author is real – Ryszard Górecki. In what terms should these works be considered? As a sophisticated joke about culture, where not only politics, but even science has devalued?

RG:

As an artist and partly a collector, I’m a great fan of “cheap art and edition,” which accompany nearly all of my shows. Produced in limited series, these relatively inexpensive objects are often an interest-yielding elixir of life for the artist. A collector can immediately, usually right after the show’s opening, take them home – and think what next. And the book, as the slogan goes, is still the “nicest gift” – in this case, an artist’s book. Even though the book era is drawing to an end, book production remains huge and easy. Virtually everyone is writing and publishing, even people who haven’t read a single book in their life. Yes, that’s devaluation! These objects are a critical and ironic reaction to the commercialization of knowledge, history, and culture. We live in an era of experts and popular-science authors who discover/create sensational niches to cash in on them. The direct inspiration came from visits to Polish bookstores. In Poland, you see much more of such popular-science or actually pseudo-science books than you do in Germany. They are also more sought after by readers. Perhaps as a nation of victims we also have more to say about perpetrators. The book has been an object of manipulation since the invention of print, a task made even easier by the onset of photography. My artist’s books are a warning and a one -hundred-percent “credible lie”: an author who’s never written a book, a nonexistent publishing company, a book without contents, limited to a grab-me dust-jacket, and finally a cover, which is a digital manipulation of an allegedly documentary photograph plus an intriguing title. The books are accompanied by limited-edition promotional posters. It is with their help, and using standard architecture, I try to create in my exhibitions the situation of a publisher’s stand that we know from the classic book fair.

SS:

Let us return at this point to your reading of the postmodern society as a business, a kind of globally managed enterprise. You’re saying that those who don’t want or don’t know how to operate within it are doomed to scavenging garbage cans for leftover food. But it seems to me there’s a third way. You, for example, don’t look for pizza slices in the bins, but for pizza boxes; they become your working material. You aren’t a partner in the business that is contemporary society, but it would be equally difficult to see you as someone functioning outside its economic and political order. You’re part of the system, but on your own special terms. In other words, art – the way you practice it – seems to me to be a third way, an alternative for the binary opposition of cog in the neoliberal machine versus modern outcast. Do I understand your position correctly?

RG:

Art, broadly defined, has always been an alternative for dominant systems, attitudes, and strategies of daily life problem-solving. It has long pointed the way towards a world where the current playing rules no longer apply, or created its own rules – new, based on a completely different value system. And at the same time it has from time to time implicated itself in a marriage with the art market and its excesses. One could quote here the cynical remark of a well-known Berlin gallerist who said that they sell all that can be sold as art. But to answer your question: yes, you could say that I’ve found a third way. And as many other artists on it, I know that in due time it will claim its ruthless existential tribute.

SS:

Are you saying that it’s hard to play with the rules of the neoliberal order and come away scot-free?

RG:

I was recently sobered up and bemused by an interview with an elderly sculptor, a star artist, who all day long sits in his kitchen over a stack of paper, listening to music and passionately making points on paper with colour marker pens. Disturbed by phone calls from gallerists – “We urgently need your new ‘stones,’ collectors are asking about them, when will you give us something?” he replies: “Kiss my you-know-what. I’m drawing!” It’s a great privilege for me too to be travelling down this distant and unknown path, which will lead me wherever I want to. When you have a piece of paper and a pencil, you become a God!