PUBLICATIONS

• Recreation

  of the World

  Ewa Nofikow

  To take and touch as object,

  to blend, scatter and sate I always want.

  To create companions and discover with them the unknown.

  Magdalena Starska

  The work of Magda Starska affects and creates emotions,

  but also makes us ask questions. In what way do the works

  affect the spectator? What spaces do they open up in you?

  What reality do they grow out of? This text will be an endeavour

  to read the works of Magda Starska and – in some

  sense – an attempt to give answers to the above questions.

  If we assume that, as Victor Turner wants, performative

  genres (cultural performances) allow us to recognize

  the mechanisms of community action, and they allow us

  to reveal the basis of social dramas1, we need to

  ask what kind of drama Starska is talking about.

  And what is the language she uses to express that

  drama like? The Turnerian concept of cultural

  performance concerns a community that tells

  of itself through a symbolic action. Through the

  chosen medium, rhythm, movement, colour and

  language, the group creates their own identity

  narrative, in this way preventing the accretion of conflict,

  defusing accumulated emotions and showing what is usually

  hidden and buried by the socially accepted norms and

  rules. The artist would then be someone who takes the floor

  on his/her own behalf and, whether he/she likes it or not,

  on behalf of the community. The artist is someone who

  diagnoses and cures because the very act of showing the

  hurtful place is a familiarization with that place; it is a gesture

  of sympathy and leaning over the suffering human.

  1. Turner V. W., “Liminality

  and the Performative Genres”.

  In: MacAloon J. J. (ed.),

  Rite, Drama, Festival,

  Spectacle: Rehearsals

  Toward a Theory of Cultural

  Performance. Philadelphia:

  A Publication of the Institute for

  Human Issues 1984, pp. 19–41.

  128 Ewa Nofikow

  Sensuality

  The only experience that leads to the acquisition of knowledge

  about world is organoleptic contact with reality.

  I experience the world in order to feel its taste, check its

  texture and hear its voices. Magdalena Starska opens up

  the viewer – metaphorically and literally. She puts us in

  a direct contact with shapes, smells and sounds. In some

  sense, she changes us into a primal organism that probes

  the world not through intellectual operations but thanks to

  the suspension of them. By changing herself into a spongy

  creature or endowing herself with pseudopods, she also

  performs a transformation of those who agreed to enter

  the space of performance. Resigning from her face and

  body, she divests those who take part in that serious place

  of their faces and bodies. They don’t denominate it but

  surely experience it. The viewers are forced to react, also

  taking part in the production of the strange and

  irrational “autopoietic feedback loop”2 that is the

  basic mechanism of every performative action.

  Both the viewers and the artist experience

  each other mostly through touch. This

  is, I reckon, the most important but not the

  only sense activated and used by Starska in her works. It

  is the thing she experiments with. In a way, it organizes

  her actions in reality. Starska perceives the world at its

  fullness, which here means materiality. The world is

  not an abstraction and its exploration is not judging and

  expressing those judgments about the “truth of reality”.

  The truth of the world is that it exists in substance (or

  rather, we would like to say, substances). In what is hard,

  fluid, soft and volatile.

  2. Fischer-Lichte E., The emergence

  of meaning. In: The Transformative

  Power of Performance. A new

  aesthetics. London and New York:

  Routledge 2008, pp. 138–160.

  Recreation of the World 129

  Even experience built by the play of perspective (The Sun

  is the Most Important) – with the lens of camera – gains

  a tactile quality. It turns out then that “really” exists in

  what can be touched (with the hand but also with the

  eye, which becomes as it were an extension of the hand).

  Thanks to the artificial eye, Starska can reach every

  aperture. So she enters them and subjects what she finds

  to “tactile” observation. She strokes and hugs because

  her sensuality is undoubtedly tender in the widest understanding

  of tenderness as a sympathetic attitude towards

  reality and all its entities.

  The dramatization of

  sensuousness, using the potential

  of newness and unpredictability

  allows the awakening of

  the sleeping and often very basic

  processes of sensual perception

  of the world. It also helps to build

  a community based not on intellectual

  theoretical grounds,

  but on more universal biological

  grounds and a sense of belonging

  to the world of nature. Starska irritates receptors in order

  to make people lose their routine of intellectually

  processing provided information and meanings. The

  meaning in Starska’s works, if we need to talk about it

  at all, is created in the liminal sphere of “in-between”.

  Between the artist and the object, between the viewer

  and the object, and finally between the viewers themselves.

  It is not a sense assumed from the start that the

  viewer should decipher. The meaning – referring to Erika

  |^ At the studio, Poznań, 2010

  |^ W pracowni, Poznań, 2010

  130 Ewa Nofikow

  Fischer-Lichte – is a reaction of the body, revealed

  or otherwise, to what is happening3. The

  viewer stops functioning as only a distanced and cold

  critic; you change into a reacting body (you have little

  choice). You are “that made companion for the trip into

  unknown” (from Magda Starska’s text).

  Space

  Spaces exploited by Starska are private spaces. The most

  obvious would be the space of the artist’s apartment (The

  Sun is the Most Important), but it is also about the ability

  to privatize the public space – galleries (Elms Threads

  Bushes and Foam) or open city space (Illumination). The

  concentration of the viewer’s attention on soft objects,

  centred in one point, makes up for the creation of the

  world’s centre. Tents, ‘jackets’, sponges – materials used

  by the artist – are not only tools; they are also a medium.

  They activate associations – bodily reactions – which

  immediately situate the viewer in the known and familiarized

  (either in experience or in imagination) space of

  the house. Simultaneously, because they are not used in

  a habitual manner, they destroy the viewer’s perception

  habits and pragmatic attitude to what is seen. The suspension

  of knowledge about the world leads to resignation

  from appraisal and judgment. A sense of curiosity and

  expectation of the artistically sensual journey, by contrast,

  switch on.

  What Starska does in the space of her apartment

  using dishes and food (The Sun is the Most Important)

  reminds us children’s play – the effortless creation

  of new worlds. It reminds us because it is not play (or

  3. Ibid., pp. 242–249.

  Recreation of the World 131

  because it is then something else). Starska in her own

  way checks what Miron Białoszewski wrote some fifty

  years ago:

  Abstrakcyjne powołanie krzesła

  przyciąga teraz

  całe tłumy rzeczywistości

  wiąże w jeden pęk

  w składzie prawdy

  rzeczywistość abstrakcji4

  /

  Abstract vocation of a chair

  now attracts

  entire crowds of reality

  bounds into one bunch

  in a warehouse of truth

  the reality of abstraction5

  The artist sees potential where it is usually not

  noticeable. She builds a little shrine where mould idols

  live, thus entering a discussion about the need for the ritualization

  of existence. The idols are alive because [they

  are] mouldy, they are also lopsided and made of beetroot

  waste – thoroughly organic. They awaken the protective

  instincts; they are like little animals that expect tenderness.

  Both the shrine rituals and the idols living in the

  sacred space are a reverse of “serious things”. Starska brings

  out the jolly, theatrical and thus primal aspect of ritual

  activities, at the same time not depriving what happens

  inside the little shrine of seriousness. It is also an attempt

  to communicate through light. Catching rays of light with

  4. Białoszewski M., Sprawdzone

  sobą. In: Utwory zebrane, Vol. 1.

  Warszawa: Państwowy

  Instytut Wydawniczy

  1987, p. 137.

  5. To the very best

  knowledge of the translator,

  Białoszewski’s poem Sprawdzone

  sobą from the book of poems

  Rachunek Zachciankowy /

  A Wishful Accounting (1959)

  has never been translated into

  English. The translation given here

  is a modest attempt to bring out

  the meaning of the poem for the

  reader (translator’s comment).

  132 Ewa Nofikow

  objects reappears in various works of the artist. In a certain

  way, it is materialized through the objects, thanks

  to which they can be caught: metal and glass. What is

  elusive is changed by Starska into substance and language.

  Time

  The privatization of the space influencing the relationships

  between the artist and the spectators is also connected

  to a specific treatment and presentation of time.

  Thanks to the camera, Starska is able to re-enact the

  process of bread baking and she also shows time in its destructive

  but creative action (Kiedy usycha, to się prostuje /

  When it Dries, it Becomes Straight –

  the title of one of Magda Starska’s

  works). In her works, time is a material

  to be processed, a challenge

  the artist responds to by finding

  ways to articulate not so much

  evanescence but change. This

  transformation in time becomes

  one of the main themes in her

  work. The transformation that

  means changing from one state

  into another (flaming fire; dough

  that becomes bread; beetroot

  waste that becomes shrine idols).

  Starska is an artist of process, to

  which she applies various themes

  and always with the awareness

  that it is necessary to cross the

  point that she has just reached.

  |^ At home, Poznań, 2010

  |^ W domu, Poznań, 2010

  Recreation of the World 133

  The artist ironically introduces the past into her private

  time. She presents herself as a “paper Cleopatra” by the

  kitchen table. The Queen of Ancient Egypt, the icon of

  pop culture, grandness put into reality and examined

  in it. Starska’s ironic games open up the liminal space of

  experiencing of what is alien. The past – i.e. what is different

  – is experienced through the activities of everyday

  life. Royal grandness is trivialized and contemporary

  everyday reality is subject to ironic ennoblement.

  Rhythm

  The reality the viewer enters is a rhythmic process of

  transformations. It is the rhythm of music, dance and

  repeated images – often containing distortions or deflections.

  6 It is a strong and ritualistic rhythm

  that does not illustrate anything but forms yet

  one more element of the world created by the

  artist. The reality that Starska speaks of through her

  works is precisely this recreated reality because it consists

  of known and recognized elements that were put

  into a different context by the artist.

  Her organic sculptures grow and outgrow each

  other, in a literal sense too. This natural rhythm of biological

  change happens to be the space of an artistic experiment,

  trying out the possibilities that living matter

  offers. It is also a form of scrutinizing oneself, placing

  oneself in an unclear and uncertain situation that opens

  up but does not allow putting everything into a uniform

  and coherent picture. Contact with this artistic matter is

  branded by an unpredictability that allows us to regain

  a child’s wonderment and bewilderment at reality.

  6. On the subject of rhythm,

  see E. Fischer-Lichte, ibid.

  134 Ewa Nofikow

  The rhythm of Starska’s works, in which a tender curiosity

  about the world teams with ironic conceptualization, is

  a strange and not-at-all-calming rhythm of replayed and

  private ritual. Starska introduces us into the limen of the

  change and tries to walk both us and herself through

  the space of movable and not fully recognized matter

  (yeast, mould). At the same time she transforms herself

  a little bit into a child who wants to have fun and a little

  bit into a shaman woman who wants to cure those who

  agree to accept her help.

  Spongy or scrappy costumes make us experience

  the smallest movement of the artist in a totally different

  way. She is either a big, soft ball or a witch blown by the

  wind from whose belly and bottom colourful pompoms

  grow (Pom Pom Boom Bam). She can be the eye of the

  camera “objectively” framing the landscape or a woman

  who suddenly finds a thick, heavy plait in her hair reminiscent

  of a pretzel.

  The rhythms on which, I reckon, this work is

  based is not only music. These are the natural rhythms

  of nature but also of the city. It is the sound of steps, the

  babble of a baby and the melody of a traditional lullaby.

  Replaying those various sounds in different configurations

  and contexts decided on the landscape of the whole.

  Summary

  The rhythmic rituals of Magdalena Starska, aiming at

  regaining the reality of extremely basic and indivisible

  experiences and sensations for the artistic work,

  introduce the receiver into an unclear luminal space in

  which meanings are not given by the active persons but

  Recreation of the World 135

  belong to the sphere of physical and biological reflexes.

  A worm, mould, a leavened cake and a human in its basic

  instincts do not differ that much. Making this clear will

  undoubtedly move the viewers from their comfortable

  position. By engaging the senses, Starska’s works activate

  biological and bodily reactions in the viewer. Thereby

  the intellect (and the ego connected to it) weakens and

  the need for an intuitive and sensual relationship with

  reality is born.

  Moving from the intellectual centre towards the

  sensuous peripheries is also connected with the unveiling

  by Magda Starska of the functioning mechanisms

  of society. In the movie The Sun is the Most Important,

  Starska shows, and at the same time deconstructs, the

  family system (her own but giving the possibility of widening).

  The hearth is a central point and is considered

  the most important point. “Everybody uses and needs

  everybody there” – Starska says. To divulge such a way

  of thinking is to ask a question about the mechanism of

  forming relationships and connections, including family

  relationships and connections. It is also an attempt to

  diagnose the situation of a male/female artist and his/

  her social roles. He/she is the one who introduces order:

  reverse, carnival and paradoxical being a reaction to

  what is given. In a lyrical comment on one of her works,

  Magdalena Starska wrote:

  To be a cleaner but not only to keep things clean

  but to let the air in between the bones crushing them.

• A Rose is a Rose

  is a Rose

  is a Rose.

  A Universe of Meanings

  in the Work of

  Magdalena Starska

  Przemysław Chodań

  
  

  When analysing our sense of reality in the Principles of

  Psychology (1890), William James described it as a relationship

  between emotional and active life and pointed

  out that the origin of all reality remains subjective. As

  Alfred Schütz states, everything, regardless of whether

  it excites and stimulates our interest, is real. To call

  a thing real means to put it in relation to ourselves. The

  author continues: “But there are several, probably an

  infinite number of various orders of realities,

  each with its own special and separate style of

  existence.”1 Those sub-universes are, among

  others, the world of science; the world of ideal

  relations; the various supernatural worlds of

  mythology and religion; the various worlds of individual

  opinion; the worlds of sheer madness and vagary, etc.

  Magdalena Starska’s art can be viewed as a generator

  of communication disturbances evoking a state of

  permanent rapture over reality, in which the world of

  experiment, the world of dream and the world of everyday

  life coexist and overlap. The artist operates the whole

  arsenal of means to which the transparent, familiarized

  and unnoticeable was attributed. Starska brings out the

  nonobvious in them and gives them life. In Starska’s case,

  focusing awareness on what is simplest and closest opens

  our eyes to the ambiguity of material culture in its simple

  expressions. It is also a particular kind of a dialogue with

  the avant-garde art tradition, e.g. idea of the autotelism of

  the artwork, the autonomy of language and the art world.

  By entering the worlds of Magdalena Starska, we

  must for a moment abandon our cognitive habits, as the

  routine ways of decoding meanings become insufficient.

  1. Schütz A., “On Multiple

  Realities”. Philosophy and

  Phenomenological Research,

  Vol. 5, No. 4 (June 1945), p. 533.

  138 Przemysław Chodań

  The life of artefacts is based on a rationality that, together

  with emotions, creates meanings. The resulting dialogue

  can turn a jar of pickled cucumbers into a love battery

  (For Calming), and clothes pegs can coil into a DNA pattern

  (Kiedy usycha, to się prostuje / When it Dries, it Becomes

  Straight). Realities of sacred and profane seem inseparable,

  and routine is nothing more than a string of hierofania

  – a manifestation of sacredness in the world. The artist’s

  drawings are inhabited by creatures and phenomena like

  those of dream images – or rather from an idiosyncratic state

  between reality and dream, in which thoughts and shapes,

  uncontrolled by the will, take on any form. We dwell between

  the worlds.

  Starska makes us lose cognitive control. She

  shows that a language taken from what is known and

  familiar can create utterly surprising configurations and

  neologisms. The film The Sun is the Most Important, shot in

  2011, in which the artist builds her private cosmos where

  real and surreal orders coexist as coincidentia oppositorum

  – the harmony of contradictions

  – illustrates this perfectly.

  Contact with Magdalena

  Starska’s art is an aesthetic experience

  comparable to an encounter

  with the literary experiment of

  constructing an autonomous language

  from given ones. Let James

  Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake serve as

  an analogy: the language of the

  novel is known and unknown at

  the same time. History has a plot

  |^ Untitled, paint, 2005

  |^ Bez tytułu, farby, 2005

  A Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose. 139

  and narration, and capturing this requires a great deal of

  concentration, which causes the state of cognitive excitement;

  we are slowly drawn into a world whose existence we

  hadn’t suspected, where known and unknown coexist at

  the same level, mixing with each other: “Then, while it is

  odrous comparisoning to the sprangflowers of his burstday

  which was a viridable goddinpotty for the reinworms and

  the charlattinas and all branches of climatitis, it has been

  such a wanderful noyth untirely, added she,

  with many regards to Maha’s pranjapansies.”2

  Magdalena Starska requires courage

  from the viewer to commune with an original

  language and making attempts to establish communication

  with the work in which the grammar – although

  constructed from what is known – lacks obvious meanings

  and directs you to an extralinguistic experience.

  The artist, by striking at quotidian grammar, touches on

  basic epistemological problems and seems to place herself

  on the side on those who speak of the inadequacy of the

  logical constructions of naming experiences.

  By devoiding everyday reality from routine and

  interfering with the meanings of things and situations,

  the artist’s work indicates the basic mechanisms of their

  creation and the conventionality of denotation. Starska’s

  artistic and cognitive attitude can be compared to the

  tenets of symbolic interactionism in sociology. As Herbet

  Blumer notes, “The term Åtsymbolic interactionÅs refers (…)

  to the peculiar and distinctive character of interaction as

  it takes place between human beings. The peculiarity lies

  in the fact that human beings interpret or “define” each

  other’s actions instead of merely reacting to each other’s

  2. Joyce J., Finnegans Wake.

  Oxford: Oxford University

  Press 2012, p. 59.

  140 Przemysław Chodań

  actions. The “response” is not

  directly to one another’s actions

  but is instead based on the meaning

  which they attach to such

  actions. Thus, human interaction

  is mediated by the use of symbols,

  by interpretation, or by ascertaining

  the meaning of one

  another’s actions.”3

  Interactionism

  in Starska’s art involves

  highlighting the dynamics

  of the construction of the senses, their processuality

  and their flexibility. The artist, by

  destroying the frontiers between social microworlds

  and the languages conforming with them, aims at producing

  shared intersubjective meanings. Observing the

  limitations of language communication, in a similar way

  to modern utopists, she moves towards the frontiers of

  language cognition, at the same time affirming every

  communicative situation and every symbolic interaction.

  Art comes dangerously close to life…

  Modern cultural output predominately consists

  of deconstructions and demythologizations serving

  different kinds of truths and instrumentally determining

  aesthetics as an ideological or even political field.

  Artists assume the falsity of culture and at the same

  time the falsity of the common consciousness. Starska

  follows a different path and thinks differently. In her

  work, the subject and commonness are positively valued.

  Włodzimierz Pawluczuk made similar postulates

  3. Blumer H.,

  Society as Symbolic

  Interaction. In: Rose A. M.,

  Human Behaviour and Social

  Processes. An Interactionist

  Approach. London: Routledge

  2013, p. 180.

  |^ Patrząc ku górze (fragment), 2013

  |^ Looking Up (fragment), 2013

  A Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose. 141

  emphasizing that for a sociologist making use of the

  output of existential phenomenology, “the commonness

  of human existence in any case cannot be treated pejoratively

  as something inauthentic, false, not worthy of

  the real human being.” It is quite the opposite: “a socially

  healthy human being lives within that – from the existential

  point of view – ÅtfalseÅs and Åtinauthentic

  Ås world, feeding oneself with its myths and

  mystifications […].”4

  Starska tries to drive the viewer’s consciousness

  towards what is called the background

  of everyday reality (“in the background

  is what is either totally indifferent to our motivations

  and aims or utterly familiarized by

  us”5). The artist gives it an aesthetic and emotional power

  so what used to be the background of consciousness

  becomes its theme. Thus she performs an act opposed

  to the widely recognized mechanisms of familiarizing

  with the world (e.g. the externalization – objectification

  – internalization pattern), which – as Pawluczuk

  suggests – are pushing something into the back of our

  consciousness. The artist calls for continuous changes

  of perspective and changes of the perception of reality.

  When communing with her work, our attention continuously

  circulates between the details. Each of them

  is a separate cosmos of senses coexisting next to each

  other, equally true and equally fading.

  By presenting the endless meanings that pulsate

  under the thin layer of everyday reality, the artist

  awakes their dormant mythogenic character. Myth

  evinces itself here as the universal form of consciousness

  4. Pawluczuk W.,

  Potoczność

  i transcendencja.

  KrakoÅLw: Zakład

  Wydawniczy Nomos

  1994, p. 15.

  5. Ibid., p. 17.

  142 Przemysław Chodań

  that Leszek Kołakowski wrote about, offering to call

  a myth all the constructions appearing in the affective

  and intellectual life of the human and based on

  acknowledging out-of-time structures or values (e.g.

  being, human condition). Mythologies in Starska’s art

  manifest themselves in a similar manner and mean

  the totality of consciousness reflecting in every detail

  of everyday reality. What makes them original is the

  fact that they do not refer to the out-of-time structures

  and values postulated by Kołakowski but they appear

  from the historically changing here and now and they

  are temporal and fatal.

  The art of Magdalena Starska creates cognitive

  excitement and fascination that includes the moment of

  uncertainty. It is the uncertainty that powers the movement

  of consciousness and aims to understand the work,

  enigmatic signs made of clay, ice cream, plants, bread

  and felt-tip pens. Witold Gombrowicz wrote in Cosmos

  about cognitive dilemmas with everyday reality, in which

  the characters Witold and Fuks

  try to create a world of intersubjectively

  shared meanings, the

  eponymous cosmos from the

  scraps of reality that pops out of

  the back of their consciousness.

  “I had been ready for anything.

  But not for the kettle. One must

  understand what is the drop that

  makes the cup overflow. What is it

  that’s Åttoo muchÅs. There is something

  like an excess of reality,

  |^ Three Centers, ink, 2009

  |^ Trzy środki, tusz, 2009

  A Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose. 143

  its swelling beyond endurance. After so many objects

  that I couldn’t even enumerate, after the needles, frogs,

  sparrow, stick, whiffletree, pen nib, leather, cardboard,

  et cetera, chimney, cork, scratch, drainpipe, hand, pellets,

  etc. etc., clods of dirt, wire mesh, wire, bed, pebbles,

  toothpick, chicken, warts, bays, islands, needle, and so

  on and so on and on, to the point of tedium, to excess,

  and now this kettle popping up like a Jack-in-the-box,

  without rhyme or reason, on its own, gratis,

  a luxury of disorder, a splendour of chaos.”6

  Magdalena Starska is not afraid of

  the abundance of reality. In her work, she presents

  the sumptuousness of the universes that

  we can establish, reconstruct or dispose of by

  immersing ourselves in the closest vicinity. The artist

  shows that everyday reality can be fascinating and the

  intensity of its influence is a question of will, perception

  and concentration. Art is one of the elements of life; it is

  a world where the boundaries have become deliberately

  blurred. The equality of languages, meanings and interpretations

  takes place.

  6. Gombrowicz W., Cosmos.

  Translated from the Polish by

  Danuta Borchardt. New Haven

  & London: Yale University

  Press 2005, pp. 68–69

• When Something Moves

  I have the Feeling that

  the Whole Universe

  Takes Part in it

  Magdalena Starska in Conversation with Zuzanna Hadryś

  
  

  Zuzanna Hadryś [ZH]: A Multi-element installation consisting

  of, among other things, several dozen open boxes

  of yeast was your diploma work (Attention! Stairs, 2005).

  Do you find that work mature from today’s perspective?

  Magdalena Starska [MS]: My approach was mature. I was

  giving myself answers to many difficult and detailed

  questions at that time. While I was making my diploma,

  it occurred to me that conscious work means giving control

  to the material. It depends on what form it will be

  created in the end. I want the moments of surprise to

  occur in the working process. Such thinking arose during

  the work on my diploma. In the Pies Gallery, where

  I was showing Attention! Stairs, I spent the whole week

  feeling the aromas coming from the bakery a floor below

  and step by step I was coming into peaceful contact with

  the installation. I thought I was slow, and I was working.

  But today I think that despite that, the installation was

  very rigid. I blame myself for not letting it go.

  ZH: Rigid – what do you mean?

  MS: The fact that I didn’t allow life into my work. But

  I think that my works never have a sufficient amount of

  life in them. I would like them to carry more movement;

  the movement of living moments, situations and objects.

  My diploma was perfectly prepared. There were yeasts

  there – I wanted to give people the chance to mould yeasts

  during the exhibition opening. So thanks to people, the

  movement should be fulfilled. However I did not think

  about the organic biological movement of the yeasts

  – fortunately they themselves showed it to me. After

  a diploma – obviously – everyone forgets about the whole

  world. I got back to the gallery after three days. The days

  154 Magdalena Starska in Conversation with Zuzanna Hadryś

  were very warm and the yeasts showed off their movement.

  I was the only one who saw that, I was completely

  on my own, the yeasts had crawled away, slipped off the

  table and on to the floor, and that work was at its most

  beautiful then.

  ZH: Then it had fulfilled.

  MS: Yes, it was complete, it amazed and surprised me, and

  at that moment I came to the conclusion that I was not so

  brilliant at predicting such things, although it was not so

  hard to predict [laugh]. Anyway, when you give control to

  objects, they show that they are something more than we

  think. I believe in certain ideas of Shintoism that every

  object is a different god, and I want to clap my hands. It is

  also a little shamanistic – to see something beyond what

  there is. And actually everything exists but it is us who

  do not see it. And when we start to see, entire unlimited

  sequences appear because one attracts the other, and one

  compliments the other. Sometimes it happens according

  to a form of logic that we are not able to understand.

  ZH: And what was it like before? How did the Poznań Academy

  of Fine Arts influence your development, how did

  you think about art back then? Did you have any masters?

  MS: Unfortunately dependencies like the master-disciple

  relationship no longer exist. But yes – a mentor is important

  – someone with whom we have a connection and who

  will see something valuable in us. Someone who reacts

  strongly to what we do because, thanks to that, a confrontation

  happens and it would be impossible to develop

  without it. In my case it was Professor Jarosław Kozłowski.

  ZH: The icon of Polish conceptualism! That’s very interesting…

  When Something Moves I have the Feeling that the Whole Universe Takes Part in it 155

  MS: Yes, our contact was defined by the fact that we didn’t

  talk much - almost nothing. Despite that, I got a lot of

  support and confirmation that what I do is needed.

  ZH: So what did your communication look like?

  MS: I just saw on his face that when he was looking at

  my work, his eyes were opening! I just felt that what

  I was doing was giving him something. Those were small

  gestures. I don’t need long talks about art.

  ZH: And what works were those? Drawings?

  MS: There were drawings at first. I produced many of them.

  I remember that before I had been in Oslo for three months:

  completely alone, every day I had been sitting in a little

  room and drawing. The biggest

  breakthrough of my life probably

  happened there. Such everyday

  work behind a little desk, a piece

  of paper and drawing. Suddenly,

  after a month I came to the conclusion

  that it was a source of great

  pleasure. Sitting and drawing –

  it was my decision. The decision

  that was made inside me while

  sitting, during an act. I came back

  and showed my drawings to the

  Professor, I organized a little exhibition and he probably

  realized that I needed a backslapping. And he was saying:

  “You see how good they are.” Then I was of course

  thrilled and I had the energy to carry on working. I also

  made my first installation – a gnome locked in a house

  who was afraid to come out. I was very involved in the

  making of that sculpture. When I brought it, a little roof

  |^ Preparations for the performance

  Without Power, Poznań, 2014

  |^ Przygotowania do performansu Bez

  mocy, Poznań, 2014

  156 Magdalena Starska in Conversation with Zuzanna Hadryś

  was closed and you had to look through the peep-hole at

  the gnome. The title was Boi się, że go wyruchają / He is

  Afraid of Being Screwed. We were talking a lot about our

  works in Jarosław Kozłowski’s class. And finally came

  the moment, when I had to say in front of everybody,

  including the Professor, what the title of the installation

  was. Tomek MroÅLz shouted “Tell them, Magda! Tell!”,

  which helped me. And I said it. I was afraid that the curse

  showed a lack of respect.

  ZH: Was anyone doing similar things at that time? Did

  you feel affinity?

  MS: At that time, I really cared about individualism. I was

  curious how independent I could manage to be. Although

  I think that there was a big influence from the people

  who were my course mates because I found it wonderful

  group. Tomek MroÅLz, Ola Winnicka, Radek Szlaga, Wojciech

  Bąkowski, Iza Tarasewicz were among them although Iza

  was in a different year. And I think all those people were

  influencing each other heavily.

  ZH: Did any artistic affinity form between you at that

  time?

  MS: Artistic affinity probably happened because we liked

  each other. Nobody knows how it is. What comes first: are

  there affinities in art or are there deep personal affinities?

  Are there just friendships and then people influence each

  other when they talk with and then do similar works –

  whether they want or not? But our works were not really

  similar; only motifs interweaved, not the ideas for the

  pieces. Everyone had their own ideas.

  ZH: And what is it like now? Did any of your realizations

  meet your expectations?

  When Something Moves I have the Feeling that the Whole Universe Takes Part in it 157

  MS: I am thinking, I am thinking… I think that two realizations

  were the closest to the ideal: the performance with

  pompoms Pom Pom Boom Bam and Ice Melting from the

  exhibition Bodies Adream. They were concerned with the

  world aiming at dilution in order to achieve one grand

  mixing. Like bodies ritually burnt to ashes after death, the

  fires are made and the smoke is freed, in the same way we

  culture and observe denser and denser structures of mould

  on a window ledge. Then I thought that everything in us

  will mix with what is outside us; that there would be no

  borders, divisions, segregation and dozing as the melting

  of the material and changing its density makes it take on

  a different form. In the performance Ice Melting, people

  were allotment gardeners who were looking after leaking

  markers and were contemplating two Italian ice creams

  melting together. And in Pom Pom Boom Bam I showed the

  movement of matter in the form of pompoms. They were

  symbols of atoms. Our bodies, as everything surrounding

  us, are an agreed form. A pompon can be made on two

  fingers, two legs, and two hands, on a building or a car. You

  can dress yourself all in pompons taken from the surroundings.

  People–Pompons want to see that they also consist of

  pompons like their environment. The great joy of being

  like a child, like an atom that comes into contact only in

  a situation of mutual pulling, only if there is some energy

  to be exchanged, is a result.

  ZH: Is it about the movement? About what exactly? Why

  is it so important for you?

  MS: Now, since I have a small child, I understand why

  movement is so important. Simply it is the nicest feeling

  to watch that movement, to look at what is moving. When

  158 Magdalena Starska in Conversation with Zuzanna Hadryś

  something is moving, we have the feeling that the whole

  universe participates in it and we are closer to an awareness

  of continuous change. That’s why it is so pleasant to

  watch a moving tree. It is the most beautiful movement

  and I would willingly copy it constantly, though that

  makes no sense because I would need to use pinwheels

  in every work.

  ZH: That’s true.

  MS: Physical movement sets our thoughts and psyche in

  motion. We can then sit somewhere or stand still and

  something is happening inside us all the time. It is known

  that there can also be non-movement in movement – and

  I try to represent this in the drawings. Indeed, they are

  only a dead line and nothing moves in them but I try

  to make movement present in them. It is there because

  I try to have constant air flow in my head. There are different

  drawings but as a rule when I draw I care that what

  is created on a piece of paper stimulates the subconscious,

  feelings and emotions. So when somebody looks at them

  carefully, they might get tired fast because it is not possible

  to introduce movement without an effort and without

  resistance. It is often that my work carries only the

  potential in them. The potential for movement and life,

  but I lack that last moment and such strength that would

  give the objects freedom. It is great – the movement is created

  when we give freedom. When for example you pour

  juice into a glass, you pour it inside the glass but why can’t

  we just spill it over the table for example?

  ZH: Then I won’t get anything to drink…

  MS: You would somehow drink because part of it would have

  been poured into a glass. Well, anyway, when something

  When Something Moves I have the Feeling that the Whole Universe Takes Part in it 159

  spreads beyond its shape, it is the best movement in the

  world. When something does not spread beyond its shape,

  beyond what we think about a certain thing.

  ZH: Tell us more about the mind-hand correlation.

  What is it like in terms of your drawing? In what way

  is the drawing an extension of what is happening in

  the brain?

  MS: Drawings have accompanied me during every stage

  and in every state. There are drawings that are a quick

  sketch of thoughts; there are drawings that should be

  as beautiful as a napkin that we look at like a Mandala,

  but there are very few like that. There are also drawings

  thanks to which I purify

  myself. And there are also drawings

  that carry some kind of joke

  with them or some idea and are

  distinctly orientated towards

  the viewer. But before they will

  be created, I need to make many

  drawings thanks to which I will

  get clean.

  ZH: In order to achieve that last

  one?

  MS: Yes, I need to reach a moment

  when I achieve a purer form, the awareness of what they

  bring in. Because when I detoxify myself with drawings,

  I am not aware what they bring with themselves. They

  are nothing but my hermetic world.

  ZH: So how do you treat those drawings that lead to detoxification?

  Are they a side product or do you consider

  them legitimate works?

  |^ Singing, fineliner, watercolours, 2008

  |^ Śpiew, cienkopis, akwarele, 2008

  160 Magdalena Starska in Conversation with Zuzanna Hadryś

  MS: Honestly speaking, they often scare me so much that

  I would prefer to treat them as side effects but it turns

  out that there is a group of people who are curious about

  these drawings. I am often afraid to give them to people

  because I don’t want to bring the dark into their life unless

  it is a darkness that brings purification. Some drawings

  are something dark that is closed, hopeless and powerless

  so there is access to little light in such a drawing. When

  drawing, I authentically start from some negative emotions

  but in the course of the work, that drawing changes

  and changes, until there is a moment when it ends with

  something positive, and I find an exit.

  ZH: We arrive at the solution of a certain paradox that

  has always intrigued me in your work. On the one hand,

  you want to use what you do to help give something

  good, on the other – your drawings are often deformed,

  macabre, reveal the darkness that is hidden in people’s

  heads. Now I understand what kind of work you did

  earlier in order to reach that lightness.

  MS: Yes, actually everyone who takes care of their personal

  energy does it. You need to exercise every day, pray,

  meditate – you name it. You need to depurate every day.

  It is the same with creative work. That’s why in order to

  reach these ‘positive’ works, I need to produce a lot of junk.

  ZH: But in your attitude towards your own works there

  is no gradation, I guess. Don’t you evaluate them in terms

  of the medium?

  MS: No, they all have an incredible value for me because

  they are just me. For me they all are great because they lead

  me to something. But I don’t necessarily like showing them.

  Although when I see that they bring someone pleasure then

  When Something Moves I have the Feeling that the Whole Universe Takes Part in it 161

  it is no big deal… Besides I sometimes take part in exhibitions

  with mentally disabled people in the Tak Gallery.

  ZH: And what works do you show then?

  MS: The “the worst” ones, of course… The gallery’s curator

  Małgorzata Szaefer loves those works but you would

  need to ask her why she likes them.

  ZH: Is there currently any form of expression that is closest

  to you? You oscillate between performance, installation

  and drawing, and now you are starting to make

  movies (The Sun is the Most Important). Would you like

  to define yourself somehow?

  MS: I absolutely don’t want to have to choose; I don’t want to

  choose any of the media. I made that decision a long time

  ago. I wake up in the morning and sometimes I feel like

  writing something, sometimes like singing, sometimes

  like dancing and sometimes I am totally romanticized

  and I want to look at a tree. And I want to have such a life

  that would allow me to authentically do what I want to do

  every day. Then the tools need to change and this gives me

  really great satisfaction. I also learned that from Kozłowski

  – that the thought comes first and then there is the tool.

  But I enriched that rule with moments of pure fascination

  with the substance or some phenomenon that lead

  me to an idea.

  ZH: How did the work on your last realization Every Step Is

  Moving Me Up (When it Dries, it Becomes Straight), shown at

  the Stereo Gallery, progress? What was that process like?

  MS: I will think about the method of my work until the

  end of my life. And I suspect that I will never achieve

  an ideal method but I am driven by the creation of it.

  Now I want those works to come to me easily: during

  162 Magdalena Starska in Conversation with Zuzanna Hadryś

  everyday gestures and everyday activities. I want life

  itself to dictate the motifs to me. My last work came into

  existence that way when I wanted to make a carousel for

  the child and I saw how wonderfully a little stick fits in

  the clothespin. And that we could create a string. And

  when I made that string, it turned out that it bends so

  beautifully around in a curve, so a form of DNA came

  to my mind right away and I started to think about that.

  It is like when you start to analyse your dreams. A stick

  with a pin may mean something

  different for everybody and this

  is just a pretext. Art – for me –

  is above all about sharing what

  you feel. I am a human being who

  constantly feels something, and

  I need to share that otherwise

  I would explode. So the fascination

  with a stick and a clothes pin

  means that there is something

  I feel that I am not fully aware

  of. Then I am usually in and

  most often I just lie, relax and the answer comes. Here

  it was just about being in the DNA string. I gave birth

  to a child, I feel continuity and it is a very strong and

  magical feeling, which I wanted to share. The process

  of drying the apple peels reflects its incredibility. When

  peelings dry, they straighten out. Every peel is a spiral

  and is peeled from one apple without interruption. I am

  able to explain this in words but it will sound very banal

  because it concerns spiritual matters. To wit, when we

  live, we get older and we age, and we achieve peace in

  |^ Experiments for the work When it

  Dries, it Becomes Straight, Poznań, 2010

  |^ Eksperymenty do pracy Kiedy

  usycha to się prostuje, Poznań, 2010

  When Something Moves I have the Feeling that the Whole Universe Takes Part in it 163

  a certain sense. Straightening is connected to drying

  and thus with death and at the same time straightening

  creates a perpendicular that is an increasingly strong

  connector with what is higher, with the spiritual space.

  At the maximal peace, with the sky, with ghosts, and with

  God. Simply with myself. So DNA, a steady continuation

  and a beautiful movement at the same time closed in

  on an apple peel. Simultaneous biological and spiritual

  fulfilment. Those two things interlocked me fantastically

  in life! Biological fulfilment influenced spiritual

  fulfilment. And I wanted to show that.

  ZH: Magda, you often say that you want to give something

  to people through your art. Tell [us] something about it.

  MS: I was wondering about that yesterday. I am terrified

  by that but I have an inclination towards being

  a preacher. What do you want to give and using what

  tools?

  ZH: You probably are… But it is more in favour of your art.

  MS: I have the impression that I am creating my own territory

  of spirituality. I think we are quite lost in terms

  of that. I am noticing that I need faith. And a prayer. It

  really helps. But well, and what to give? I think that this

  obsession of mine to give concerns the will of creating

  a potential situation for people to help them plumb the

  nature of life. It all sounds so trivial – blah blah blah. It is

  about some stopping. There is so much potency we could

  derive [from]. Together. I attend white singing classes

  and those moments in the singing group fulfil my need

  for community. Then when people think of themselves

  a lot they become a burden, a shadow blocking the sun,

  a disturbed presence. Why does the human have to use

  164 Magdalena Starska in Conversation with Zuzanna Hadryś

  their possibility to exude such strong energy badly… Sometime

  I used to want to shake people and introduce some

  surprise into their heads.

  ZH: And did it work?

  MS: Well, actually no.

  ZH: You realized a few actions like that that were to

  introduce a change and engage people. What did you

  learn during that work?

  MS: Yes, that was pretty naive and now I am aware that

  I was objectifying the human a little bit in my expectations.

  I thought for instance: I would design chairs and

  people would be sitting on them, they would be doing

  this and that and then they would think this and that.

  But that didn’t happen; nothing ever happened the way

  I thought it would happen. That’s why I am now perfecting

  my method again and I know that things happen in

  the head of the viewer. I would very much like people to

  experience the work physically, but unfortunately our

  culture is too poor for that. People are introduced into

  the world of art too cautiously, everybody is afraid of

  touching, everybody is afraid of thinking and everybody

  is afraid of sensing art. And I want to give people more

  situations that foster feeling. We still live according to

  commonplace patterns. I am a very demanding person

  for myself and for others; I constantly want something

  to happen and movement to exist. That’s why my aim

  for today is to create situations in which people would

  unite in shared contemplation. At the Tate Modern,

  there was once a work by Olafur Eliasson presenting

  a gigantic sun. Experience of that work was apocalyptical

  but at the same time atavistically calming. It was influencWhen

  Something Moves I have the Feeling that the Whole Universe Takes Part in it 165

  ing people in a very contemplative way. I want people to

  experience and [I want] the meeting to be an experience.

  ZH: Your art is perceived as very emotional and personal

  but from what you say we can deduce that you have

  critical ambitions even though you start from a totally

  different point. In what you do and think, you can find

  an objection towards the schemes society is built on.

  MS: In a way yes, but critical approach often lacks heart,

  and I think this needs to be rebuilt in an artist. It seems

  to me that the work being shown now at Stereo does not

  have a critical aspect in itself and is light in a sense that it

  doesn’t stop someone pondering but stimulates one to live.

  ZH: Yes, that’s a profound affirmation.

  MS: Yeah. And I want to make affirmative works. It’s better

  to use intelligence to find the solution to the problems

  that we see. Affirmation is about that – finding something

  good in reality. Now I do not want to tell people what

  they should think but [I want to] provoke situations in

  which they would succumb to pleasant experience of

  being.

  ZH: Do you get information back from the audience?

  MS: Yes. But it is still not what I think of although I am on

  a good path. My works used to be exaggerated, colourful,

  so it was obvious that people liked them, and they fired

  up the imagination. But it is a little too small; I would

  like that pleasure to be a spiritual pleasure…

  ZH: Let’s talk about Penerstwo a little bit. I am interested

  in what the collaboration with certain members of the

  group looks like from your perspective? You performed

  together in various configurations; you had group exhibitions

  and actions. What happened back then?

  166 Magdalena Starska in Conversation with Zuzanna Hadryś

  MS: When it comes to the whole group, I just feel high.

  I think we like each other a lot and we inspire each other.

  It lifts the spirits a lot, strengthens my creativity and work.

  It is like that but I cannot say that the contact with Penerstwo

  brought something particular into my works. It is

  simply about the fact of encountering of a group of people

  who have a good impact on each other and have similar

  thoughts. There is simply an impulsion, we make a group

  just because we send impulses to each other so you cannot

  think of us in a classical and standard way. This means that

  it doesn’t matter when we came

  into existence or what the shared

  guidelines and goals we want to

  achieve are. Impulses exist so that

  we could swim towards total freedom

  and arbitrariness, but they

  are also a binding material. We

  make a group only because we

  influence each other and even if

  we didn’t call ourselves a group,

  we would be one anyway. It is not

  possible to tame it the other way.

  Will it be possible to explain the

  fact that it is so easy to collaborate with each other in any

  other way? A lot of the credit goes to Michał Lasota without

  whom there would be no group exhibitions of Penerstwo

  and our shared themes would never come into light. He

  observes us from the side and denominates that phenomenon.

  When collaborating with Wojciech Bąkowski, it was

  Head of Heads, and the exhibition at the Arsenal Gallery

  in Białystok.

  |^ Preparations for the performance

  Elms Threads Bushes, Poznań, 2009

  |^ Przygotowania do performansu

  Wici nici krzaki, Poznań, 2009

  When Something Moves I have the Feeling that the Whole Universe Takes Part in it 167

  ZH: And how do you recall collaboration with Iza Tarasewicz

  on the exhibition Elms Threads Bushes?

  MS: That’s a totally different story. We are interested in

  similar themes; we think about similar things at the same

  time and creating that exhibition was like working with

  my own clone. It was exceptionally pleasant, easy and

  joyful. The theme of sexuality was the starting point and

  we reached similar conclusions that sexuality is looking

  for the possibilities of exchange. The energy produced

  thanks to that needs to be used in as many directions as

  possible. There is not one source, there are many sources.

  As spaces to reproduce and even more to desire. I was

  inspired there by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

  ZH: What did that mutual experience give you? Did something

  of what you expected happen?

  MS: Well, yes… Here the topic of collaboration with another

  human being that teaches about divesting oneself of stiffness

  pops up. But is there so much happening inside us

  when we collaborate with someone? That I don’t know,

  and I don’t have much experience of that type. There are

  very few people willing to collaborate. I am afraid we

  need to make too many compromises then and art does

  not like it. However, I get great satisfaction from working

  with Iza. And it was fulfilled during the making of the

  performance. That is, we surrendered to a trance. And

  company during a trance enhances its state.

  ZH: Was it something like the performance with the

  pompons?

  MS: No. The pompons were my idea from beginning to

  end, absolutely. And here there were our shared thoughts.

  In the Stereo Gallery, we were in a trance that made an

  168 Magdalena Starska in Conversation with Zuzanna Hadryś

  assumption of that work. We were in such trance-like

  contact with each other, which is why it lasted for so

  long – I could not stand almost an hour of a constant

  action by myself. And the fact that Iza was there and

  was empathising with the same thing I was gave me an

  impulse. We felt each other, not looking at each other,

  we were unicellular organisms. And that was fantastic

  experience. But whether it was communicative – I don’t

  know. I have a huge sentiment for that performance,

  anyway. Such communication and cooperation are rare.

  It is often that someone wants to be to the fore or they

  hide. And in that case, we both felt the idea of unicellular

  organisms in the same way and we reduced ourselves to

  a simple being: our hands and legs were like elms that

  were moving unwittingly, they did what impulse dictated

  to them at a particular moment.

  ZH: You accomplished regression together.

  MS: Yes, that was wonderful. Regression to unicellular

  contact.

  ZH: When are you satisfied with your work (intellectually

  and formally) regardless of the intentions and

  emotions?

  MS: Intellectual satisfaction occurs when I create a new

  method. It amazes me a little. I also like to create and

  produce. I then have the feeling of lightness and I am

  ‘more’ present – in society and in my own life – because

  I feel needed. In contrast, after completing a work

  rather anxiety appears. However solicitude because of

  the reception of the work is smaller and satisfaction

  during work is bigger. To all intents and purposes, it is

  not about satisfaction but only about doing. And this

  When Something Moves I have the Feeling that the Whole Universe Takes Part in it 169

  work will never end. I can write my signature under

  the sentence I once heard from someone that we create

  one work our whole life. It is also not that I have

  a creative period and inspiration, and then after that

  I am exhausted and don’t know what to do. I work all

  the time, every element of reality is able to impregnate

  me, and it is simply enough to let you succumb to that.

  Inspiration is sitting and waiting and I am a supporter

  of constant inner work. I also work when I don’t produce.

  I used to blame myself for taking breaks, half a year or

  a year, but in fact I was working all the time, thinking

  about the method. That is why I stick to the method so

  much – it turns out that this powers me.

  ZH: I am interested in the moment of making choice –

  technique and tools, for example you often use a pen

  or a used marker or some strange old yellowed pieces

  of paper – what is that choice dictated by? Why are you

  so interested in marginalia, products leached by time

  and wear?

  MS: I am driven by the pure child’s wish – ‘I want to

  check that’. And marginalia, the theme of remnants

  and waste – it’s my fascination lately. I am fascinated

  by what function they make in everyday life and why

  they are thrown into the garbage. The aversion to looking

  at waste – I want to raise that topic in the film that

  I am currently making. Remnants are like our own cast

  off problems that we do not want to solve. I have a lot of

  tenderness towards remnants and waste. And when it

  comes to paper, a piece of paper lying somewhere and

  yellowing for ten years or trampled by fifteen people

  has its own history for sure. That history affects me and

  170 Magdalena Starska in Conversation with Zuzanna Hadryś

  I am into it. Then that piece of paper is not a white space

  from which a human bounces off; we can walk into such

  a piece of paper. When I am drawing, I like to enter that

  impure whiteness. It is not flat then. I definitely like to

  draw on old, found pieces of paper. They also have different

  formats, colours and everything is important for

  me. The grandeur of substance.

  ZH: And does something still lurk in you? Is there a technique

  you would like to try?

  MS: Honestly speaking, I would like to paint. I even have

  few canvases.

  ZH: You see, that’s a topic that, in relation to you, intrigues

  me a lot.

  MS: During my studies, I liked to paint. Unfortunately

  I allowed myself to be persuaded by Professor Kałucki, who

  told that I couldn’t paint at all. He meant the technique.

  And today I know that it was about patience because back

  then I only painted in oils, which we should use in a way

  dictated by their chemical composition and not in an

  impulsive way. Besides, I like to treat colours in a basic

  way, i.e. a colour as something more like a symbol. I don’t

  have a need to mix an appropriate colour for long because

  I am more interested in the content. And in painting, you

  cannot scribble with a colour that you are not aware of or

  not know the substance of a certain paint because some

  kind of clash may occur. For me, my paintings were ok but

  according to the Professor, some kind of yellow did not sit

  well on the painting. I became estranged and I resigned

  from painting. Because I was unable to find a solution to

  that problem despite the fact that it was explained to me

  technically. I was not able to grasp that with my imaginaWhen

  Something Moves I have the Feeling that the Whole Universe Takes Part in it 171

  tion. If I had understood it, maybe it would have pushed

  me to farther work.

  ZH: Are you now ready to go back to painting?

  MS: Yes, I am. But you need time and patience for that

  and you need to sort everything out. And I like changing

  stances and work techniques. I would need a huge

  studio with a different work stand every two meters.

  That is my dream. I used to paint in watercolours a great

  deal but I know now that I need to look for a different

  painting language.

  ZH: Magda, you describe the world with your own language

  and what you do is very deeply rooted in the world.

  We can have the impression that you

  are a totally autonomous artist. Do

  you conform with anything at all,

  find inspiration in what is happening

  in contemporary art (apart from

  Penerstwo) or put yourself in opposition

  to something?

  MS: I prefer not to receive art at all

  than to receive poor, unreal [art].

  There are a few artists who have had

  a great influence on me: Janet Cardiff

  with her walking stories and sound

  installations, and Stanya Kahn and

  Harry Dodge and their video movies bordering on madness

  but detoxifying thanks to the ritual and comic elements

  like pissing in an empty crisps packet. I also need

  beautiful works that fill me with happiness, joy, the desire

  for life or curiosity. I get tired of art that is referential,

  plays games like a jigsaw or puzzles from facts that don’t

  |^ Studio, Poznań, 2008

  |^ Pracownia, Poznań, 2008

  172 Magdalena Starska in Conversation with Zuzanna Hadryś

  come from the creator. There is no courage in such works.

  That is for people who have this kind of intelligence –

  absorbing facts, dates and names. People being in the past.

  I have an utterly different approach: based on the feeling

  of what is happening. I am inspired by life and I need only

  that. That’s why I would not be able to live in Berlin where

  everything has already been artistically processed. I would

  feel leached. I definitely prefer life in the country; I feel

  good in the city but it has to be an average city without

  an excess of arts all around.

  ZH: The less art the better?

  MS: Yes, and that’s why I need to move out of Jeżyce

  [laugh].

  ZH: And what do you think of Althamer?

  MS: I forgot about him! Althamer is great! He is a brilliant

  thinker, his works are unpretentious and he does what

  I would love to do. But cannot. I say a lot that I would like

  to do something for people, and he just does it. I have the

  impression that he has that inner freedom in him, which

  he follows, and his ideas are pure. He feels no need to be

  a preacher, only to work creatively with people.

  Poznań 2010

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Does the Nomad’s Face

  Swim like an Eel? Ewa Klekot

  
  

  On the light-lacquered stave floor of the gallery, a small

  shrine made of a checked blanket stands surrounded by

  green pot plants; some are real, some are plastic. In the

  shrine, immolated ice cream with chocolate melts onto

  a granite slab forming multi-coloured streaks. Above

  the shrine a yellow sky with a cloud of yellow markers

  hovering with ink draining out of them makes yellow

  smudges. Behind the circle of green is some kind of conical

  tent made of fabric resembling felt, and further a huge

  haycock; between tall columns of artificial vegetation

  [is] a quadruped made of wooden wagon benches and

  a vacuum cleaner. On the wall, a multi-coloured caption:

  the word ‘love’ for five ‘voices’ multiplied as in a canon

  – yellow starts, blue ends, in the meantime green, red

  and dirty violet join in. Along the wall a long tunnel

  made of the same grey fabric that looks like a felt but is

  reminiscent of a floor cloth...

  The commonness of the materials, the triviality

  of the objects used for building the installation

  and the unusual fantasy of the author bring associations

  with the workshop of the Arte Povera artists. In

  the works of Magdalena Starska, what is everyday and

  banal transforms and gains meaning. Most evidently,

  the artist finds pleasure in constructing surprising

  objects, mechanical toys, like a volcano from a kettle,

  and educational models like a plaster stalagmite with

  plastic pipes through which you can look inside. There

  are also object-victims of experiments called “and what

  happens if…” – for example when we pour plaster into

  a plastic basket. A resourceful child with huge dose of

  fantasy could be proud of such ideas.

  112 Ewa Klekot

  The artist willingly constructs small spaces that we can

  enter – to find shelter, look at the world from inside, i.e.

  from a different perspective – and we could be perceived

  utterly differently through a hole in the tent as well. The

  outdoor work Beztwarzowcy / Faceless People shown by Starska

  in Katowice was designed as an invitation to serious

  reflection on the ways of perceiving others and ourselves;

  however it was based on precisely the same mechanism

  of play: you should look through the hole and you should

  walk inside. Being in the middle,

  being inside, in a small and safe

  space is of course an experience of

  children’s games under the table,

  in the wardrobe or a blanket tent,

  but it is also the experience of

  finding shelter in a nomad’s living

  construction: yurt, hut or tipi.

  Elements indicating

  temporariness, mobility and

  nomadism appear – apart from

  the deeper layers of meanings

  about which [I will write] in

  a moment – in practically all the works of Magdalena

  Starska. The motif of the transformation of common matter

  or trivial objects, which on the one hand introduces

  serious questions about the relationship of everyday

  reality and art, and on the other hand encourages us to

  activate children’s creativity and mutual play, is present

  in all he works. The attitude towards the world that could

  be recognized in Starska’s works, can be described with

  the use of the figures of the child and the nomad.

  |^ At the studio, Poznań, 2012

  |^ W pracowni, Poznań, 2012

  Does the Nomad’s Face Swim like an Eel? 113

  The nomad’s and child’s figures are present in the critique

  of modernity understood as a project from its very

  beginning and entered into the dialectics of different

  incarnations of enlightened reason and romantic spirit

  that form modern and late-modern times. The critical

  potential of these figures is connected with the marginal

  status of the child and the nomad. It results from the fact

  that representatives of both these groups present a certain

  dearth in terms of humanity in the modern sense

  of that term. A nomad and a child are human beings

  but in the transition states because of the specificity

  of their relationships with an environment different

  from the relationships that adults and settled people

  have. A nomad is devoid of a space embedding based on

  the ownership of that space necessary for delimiting

  a modern identity. A child has been embedded in the

  space for too short a time in order to have an awareness

  characteristic of a human being in modern times, the

  understanding of which is connected with time flow

  and historicity.

  Nomad

  A modern human thinks that a nomad lives in a state of

  suspension between animalism and humanity. „A man

  who spends his whole life following animals just to kill

  them to eat, or moving from one berry patch to

  another, is really living like an animal himself,”

  1 one British archaeologist wrote.

  Such an understanding of humanity

  has, as it turns out, a direct source in the conviction of

  Friedrich Engels that “The most that the animal can

  1. Braidwood R. J., Prehistoric Men.

  3rd edition. Chicago: Museum of

  Natural History 1957, p. 45.

  114 Ewa Klekot

  achieve is to collect; man produces, he prepares the means

  of life… which without him nature would not have produced.”

  2 In this situation, a nomad who does not produce

  but hunts and gathers turns out to be suspended

  somewhere between the condition of a human

  and of an animal. “Underlying the collection/

  production distinction then is a master narrative

  about how human beings, through their

  mental and bodily labour, have progressively

  raised themselves above the purely natural level

  of existence that all other animals are confined

  to, and in so doing have built themselves a history

  of civilization. Through their transformations of

  nature, according to this narrative, humans have also

  transformed themselves,”3 – the British anthropologist

  Tim Ingold explains the modern perspective of the view

  on nomadism, trying to explain Western preconditions

  of the marginal position of the nomads.

  The problem is also that hunters and gatherers

  do not aim to transform their environment but try

  to keep it as far as it is possible in a form undistorted

  by human actions. With regard to that, they do not use

  the term of ownership in relation to the space the same

  way settlers do. The nomad makes use of the resources of

  nature that he is a part of, thus being the owner of a forest

  or a meadow from his perspective does not make sense

  because he would need to be a subject and an object of his

  own property (similarly being the owner of tigers or deer

  living in the forest). In contrast, the modern settled man

  puts himself (subject) above the environment, which can

  become – in his opinion – a subject of his own property.

  2. Engels F., Dialectics of Nature.

  Progress Publishers 1934, p. 308.

  3. Ingold T.,

  The Perception of the

  Environment. Essays

  in livelihood, dwelling

  and skill. London–New York:

  Routledge 2000, p. 78.

  Does the Nomad’s Face Swim like an Eel? 115

  A nomad is someone on the margins of the society of

  settled people, i.e. modern; someone who considers himself

  a user of the world and not its owner. As Tim Ingold

  writes – “Hunter-gatherers have a history, but theirs is

  a history that is written neither in the pages of documents

  nor upon the surface of the land. It is inscribed

  exclusively upon the plane of mental rather than material

  reality. [...] the rather paradoxical conclusion that it is

  in their [hunter-gatherers’] societies that the boundary

  between the mental and the material, between culture

  and nature, is most clear-cut.”4 So paradoxically

  nomads rather than the modern settled

  people would be farthest from the state of

  “natural animal savageness”; it is those, poor in terms

  of material things that are the

  real titans of the human spirit.

  On the one hand, reflections

  on nomadism harmonize

  with the ‘poor’, ‘coincidental’

  and ‘found’ materiality of

  the works, and on the other hand

  with the conceptual character

  of Starska’s art. We could say

  that her works are characterized

  by nomadism in a modern

  sense. In this way – through

  nomadic features – they reveal

  their critical potential towards modernity as the way

  of functioning in the world. Starska’s works do not

  slot into the current of critical art – on the contrary,

  against a background of socially critical activities or

  4. Ibid., p. 79.

  |^ At the studio, Poznań, 2010

  |^ W pracowni, Poznań, 2010

  116 Ewa Klekot

  works by the majority of Polish artists from this time,

  they strike us with an affirmative attitude towards the

  world. Their critical potential is not aimed at particular

  constituencies of modern reality: social injustice, environmental

  pollution, exclusion due to gender, race or

  age, but at the modern order of a settled world as such.

  By affirming the reality of common found materials

  that she uses within a very restricted time horizon, the

  artist stands on the side of the nomads’ world, radically

  marginalized by the world of modern settled people

  because it denotes a totally different relationship with

  environment.

  Nomadism as a way of life also means a different

  attitude towards ownership and goods helping

  to survive than among settled people. Most importantly,

  securing a living is not based on accumulation

  but on constant movement. The circulation of goods

  is a nomadic dimension of the economy so on the one

  hand Starska’s work, which encourages the exchange

  of homemade preserves, could be also read in those

  categories.

  On the other hand, the accentuation in the work

  of question of stocks and placing the whole of it in the

  middle of a haycock brings to mind associations with an

  idyllic vision of a village community and indeed anticapitalistic

  but not at all nomadic concepts of the ethics

  of cooperative activity. So we still remain in a modern

  imaginarium where nomadism is an unwanted element.

  From the perspective of leftist analysts, like Zygmunt

  Bauman, nomadism of goods and capital are dangerous

  features for the man, contesting the relationship

  Does the Nomad’s Face Swim like an Eel? 117

  of capital with the place where it was produced and as

  a consequence divesting the investor of the sense of

  responsibility for the investment. The sense of responsibility

  for the environment is an attribute of settled

  people who have control over the world, and who feel

  guilty about its destruction and want to save it.

  A nomad does not control the world but is a part

  of it. Just as the ownership of a space lies beyond the

  horizon of his understanding, the trust that a nomad

  has for the world lies beyond the horizon of understanding

  of a settled man. Hunters and gatherers live thanks

  to the world and not against it. Tim Ingold phrases the

  question of nomadic maladjustment

  and the modern vision of

  the world in the following way:

  “Suffice it to note that the essence

  of the kind of thought we call

  ‘Western’ is that it is founded

  in a claim to the subordination

  of nature by human powers of

  reason. Entailed in this claim

  is a notion of making things as

  an imprinting of a prior conceptual

  design upon a raw material

  substrate. Human reason is

  supposed to provide the form,

  nature the substance in which

  it is realised. We have already

  encountered this idea of making

  in the writings of Bacon, but

  more than two hundred years

  |^ Love, BWA Zielona GoÅLra, 2013

  |^ Miłość, BWA Zielona GoÅLra, 2013

  118 Ewa Klekot

  later it served as the fulcrum of Marx’s theory of value,

  according to which it was the work of shaping up the

  material from its raw to its final state that bestowed

  value on what was already ‘given’ in nature. It made no

  difference, in principle, whether that work was represented

  by the labour of the artisan, in the manufacture

  of equipment, or by that of the farmer or stockbreeder,

  in the husbandry of plants and animals. Both

  were conceived as instances of productive making

  – the human transformation of nature.”5

  Magdalena Starska’s works often suggest

  a totally different – non-modern but nomadic – way

  of addressing the case of creation. The found object, the

  common and omnipresent raw material suggests its

  usage; in Starska’s works, there is plenty of room for

  a surprise; initiative is often on the side of matter. The

  artist activates a process however it is not “imprinting

  in the material previously designed pattern” but rather

  reaching a form that results from the possibilities of the

  raw material. Potential is on the material’s side, and the

  artist’s task is to free it and not

  to subject it to patterns designed

  by oneself. It is not about control

  over the world but about being

  part of it.

  Child

  The child – like the nomad –

  collects and does not produce

  anything in a modern sense of

  those terms: he can only play with

  5. Ibid., p. 80.

  |^ Preparations for the exhibition

  Together We Get Through Everything,

  Poznań, 2014

  |^ Przygotowania do wystawy Razem

  przetrwamy wszystko, Poznań, 2014

  Does the Nomad’s Face Swim like an Eel? 119

  found objects. Like a nomad, it is on the margins of society

  but for slightly different reasons. “When it comes to

  adults’ attitude towards children in the Western world,

  I think that we should distinguish three periods – the

  French writer Michel Tournier wrote. Let’s call them:

  classical, romantic and Freudian. For the classicists, that

  means more or less before the Great French Revolution, all

  good comes from the society. Society creates civilization,

  society brings up and nature is bad. The Christian point

  of view is connected with the classical approach. The

  child is basically bad. It is a little animal: skittish, lazy

  and mendacious. It is characterized by little sensitivity

  and is robust, and we can hit it in any way and nothing

  will happen to it. What is more, it has an ugly affinity

  for dying. […] If a child became the victim of a killer, it

  made extenuating circumstances: it was believed that

  he did not kill a full human being. […] With the arrival

  of the Romantics this approach gets totally reversed!

  […] This tendency reaches its zenith with Rousseau. The

  second half of the eighteenth century, when the idea that

  one needs to create special children’s clothes and that

  they should not be dressed like adults is born, is a very

  important date. […] What is a child now? Well, now it is

  very simple, a child is nature, nature is good and purity,

  and society is bad. The classical point of view has been

  reversed. So once again it was necessary, as during the

  classicism, to isolate the child from society because society

  spoils children. The classicists drew the children

  away from society, because the child was spoiling society,

  it was tarnishing it with its excretions, screams and

  roughness. Now things are quite the opposite. […] What

  120 Ewa Klekot

  will Freud do? Seemingly it is a return to classicism.

  Towards the huge outrage of society which in children’s

  cases started being romantic, Freud claims that a child

  is a sexual creature, that it has amoral desires and it is

  neither an angel of Victor Hugo nor the born purity of

  Jean Jacob Rousseau. And here he refers to classicism,

  to a naughty child driven by instincts, badly raised and

  uncivilized. However he introduces a certain

  novelty in comparison to classicism: well, for

  Freud a child is delicate and uncivilized, but

  delicate. It is a little animal but an animal that

  is easily hurt so we should be careful.”6

  In the opinion of later psychoanalysts,

  especially Karen Horney, it is necessary to pay attention

  to the fact that a child should not to be afraid of losing

  the love of adults in the future, especially of that very

  significant other. Magdalena Starska’s installation Love,

  which was created during a performance opening the

  exhibition in Zielona GoÅLra, takes the form of a five-colour

  caption multiplied like in a musical canon. Thanks

  to this, it is associated with the simple children’s song

  sung in a few voices. The canon is one of the simplest

  techniques with multiple voices and the most willingly

  used in the amateur performances of the songs: a simple

  motif is introduced by the next voices a few measures

  later, which at the culminating point creates a complex

  chord. The Installation Love works in a similar way – like

  an unpretentious simple children’s song.

  A feeling of guilt is one of the results of hurting

  a delicate little Freudian animal. A motif that often comes

  back in anthropological issues of the ethnocentricity of

  6. Tournier M.,

  “Piszę zawsze książki dla

  dzieci…”. In: Dzieci [Children], Vol.

  II. Eds. M. Janion and S. Chwin.

  Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie

  1988, pp. 311–12.

  Does the Nomad’s Face Swim like an Eel? 121

  psychoanalysis or its universality

  is precisely a question of the

  feeling of guilt. It still remains

  an open problem, whether it is

  connected to one of the Judeo-

  Christian traditions of Western

  upbringing, so it seems from the

  anthropological perspective.

  So if responsibility without the

  feeling of guilt does exist then

  what should it be based on? The

  based-on-a-feeling-of-guilt responsibility for the grim

  state of the colonial and postcolonial world resulted

  in a passion for saving that is too often involved with

  the sentiment called “imperialistic nostalgia” by the

  American anthropologist Renato Rosaldo. Man appears

  again as a ruler of the natural environment – but this

  time, driven by the feeling of guilt for this ruling, he is

  trying to change something in order to fix [things] but

  it is really too late. However, acting to help someone or

  something to survive can come not from the feeling of

  guilt but from empathy and the feeling of solidarity with

  other inhabitants of the world. The adults of the modern

  West are prone to attribute such an attitude to children

  who – like the nomads – are surely closer to the animals.

  In such a configuration of emotions, Starska’s work Corn

  Puffs Will Fly Away can be interpreted through a child’s

  figure. The installation is a fanciful bird feeder: a threedimensional

  construction made of corn puffs glued and

  tied together, decorated with strips of bacon and placed

  on the snowbound pavement.

  |^ Preparations for the exhibition

  Together We Get Through Everything,

  Poznań, 2014

  |^ Przygotowania do wystawy Razem

  przetrwamy wszystko, Poznań, 2014

  122 Ewa Klekot

  The works such as a volcano [made] of a kettle, a quadruped

  [made] of a vacuum cleaner and a wooden wagon

  bench, a plaster stalagmite with an interior we can look

  at through plastic pipes or a big family of spongy creatures

  from the installation Foam can also be interpreted

  through the figure of a child and its relationships with

  the world. Interest is an emotion that dominates both in

  their perception and is also projected by the viewer onto

  the process of creation. So the shrine made of a checked

  blanket is a place where ice creams were immolated

  on the altar of children’s curiosity. And how can we

  find out otherwise where the patterns on the stones

  and other doodles come from? Does this mean that the

  stone used to be hard once, then melted like ice cream?

  Maybe the experiment has a totally different purpose.

  Starska’s shrine is surely also a children’s secret, a view

  scattered over the ground and secured with a piece of

  broken glass.

  The emotion of curiosity that the artist constructs

  on the one hand through the commonness and

  everydayness of the materials used with a great fantasy

  and in a surprising way, and on the other through the

  seeming temporariness of the solutions suggesting the

  strategy: “and what happens if we make this out of that?”

  However the temporariness is only ostensible because the

  installations are designed for the gallery exhibition and

  their life does not end when “the game of…” peters out.

  Besides, Starska uses the gallery for testing solutions not

  only crossing the boundaries of the triviality of materials

  but also the banality of mundane everyday actions and

  the unbearably unimportant. After a public peeling of

  Does the Nomad’s Face Swim like an Eel? 123

  the apples in the shadow of a visually effective installation

  in the form of double spirals made of wooden clothes

  pins linking the floor of the gallery with its ceiling, the

  artist suspended the peel on a previously prepared perch,

  complementing the landscape of the gallery with one

  more significant element. A little plate with the peeled

  apples standing next to the chair on which the artist

  had been sitting introduces one more association with

  the room where children play and where some adult has

  just peeled the apples for them for a dessert.

  How to Look at

  Magdalena Starska’s Works?

  A long tunnel made of grey felt fabric was one of the works

  presented at the BWA in Zielona GoÅLra. The nomadic associations

  of felt are apparent: the houses of Asian nomad

  herdsmen are made of wool and felt; the same fabric the

  artist used to make her conical tent for the installation

  Foam. In the walls of the tunnel are felt shrines: a poor

  sacral space? A tent for the souls?

  The famous surrealist writer Henri Michaux

  wrote: “The soul loves to swim. To swim you stretch out

  on your stomach. The soul disconnects itself and goes

  away. It goes away swimming. [...] We often speak of flying.

  This is not that. It is swimming that it does. And it

  swims like snakes and eels, never otherwise.

  Many people thus have a soul that loves to swim.

  They are commonly called lazy people. When the soul

  leaves the body from the stomach to swim, an indefinable

  sort of liberation is produced, an abandon, an intense

  fulfilment, an intimate letting go.

  124 Ewa Klekot

  The soul goes away to swim in the stairway or in the

  street according to the timidity or boldness of the man,

  for it always keeps a thread from itself to him […]. So

  when it finds itself swimming far away, from

  this simple thread that ties the man to the soul,

  masses and masses of a kind of spiritual matter

  stream, like mud, like mercury, or like a gas –

  fulfilment without end.”7

  From the perspective of the modern

  colonizer, one of the main vices of a nomad and a child

  is laziness. As Michaux writes, laziness is indulging the

  soul’s love of going away, going swimming. In modern

  societies, in which time has become the basic commodity,

  laziness is associated with free time and is included in

  more and more important sectors of economy. Magdalena

  Starska is again in favour of an alternative for modern free

  time and creates situations in which the soul can “swim

  like an eel” – be it on the blankets

  placed around an illuminator

  under a concrete trestle in

  Ostrava or inside the felt tunnel.

  The artistic reality created

  by Magdalena Starska remains

  a challenge for modernity, mostly

  because a human being is not isolated

  from the artist’s work though

  also is not a main theme of it. In

  those works, there is no modern

  humanism or dehumanization.

  When looking for an alternative

  for the modern experience of

  7. Michaux H., Laziness. Translated

  by Charlotte Mandell. Available

  at www.charlottemandell.com/

  (accessed 5 March 2014).

  |^ Head of Heads, BWA Białystok, 2009

  |^ Głowa z głów, BWA Białystok, 2009

  Does the Nomad’s Face Swim like an Eel? 125

  a human as an enlightened ruler of the world and a Faustian

  creator (who has more victories than losses on his

  account) or victims of existing relations of production, the

  artist tries to create a world whose part of the man would

  like to feel even for a minute.