BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Afterimages of memory, frames of imagination. On the sculptures of Martyna Jastrzębska

  by Maksymilian Wroniszewski

   

  The past is an arrangement of odd shards… that’s what it really is… So it is worth considering that despite everything we want it to be alive, filled with people and tangible… and that this need is so stubborn within us…

  Witold Gombrowicz - Dziennik (Journal)

   

  “So, where is the exhibition?” came the pressing question from one of the participants of the opening of "Vergessenheit", which was shown in the Wyspa Art Institute in Gdańsk. It would make for an elegant anecdote, if it were not for the gaze of a spectator entering the exhibition hall – first inspecting the empty walls of the gallery before ultimately tracing upward toward the only exhibit on display. Said object was a deformed ship hull suspended under the ceiling and made from bitumix - a combination of glue and bitumic mass, whose application is Martyna Jastrzębska’s signature technique. So far, the results of the sculptor’s work with the material could be seen mainly in Tricity galleries. Among earlier works of the artist it is important to mention the "Godło" and "Pożegnanie" installations (Emblem and The Farewell in English, respectively). This is not only because of the fact that both were presented on the recently concluded exhibition of the graduates of Gdańsk’s Academy of Fine Arts. It was especially because, together with Vergessenheit, they create a kind of triptych whose meaning coils around the problems of “unmemory”, forgetting, and both individual and collective identity.

   

  "Godło" was created two years ago. The piece is a heraldic shield modelled from bitumix and suspended on a wall. Draped behind it is a red fabric flowing onto the floor. Recognising the object as a take on the Polish emblem is immediate and seems natural. It is precisely the spontaneous identification with the national symbol that becomes the first context by which Jastrzębska’s installation can be interpreted. The artist seems to be testing her audience. By converting the legally protected image of the Polish emblem into an artefact formed out of a tarry substance, she touches upon notions related to the mechanisms that guide the viewer’s perception and their strategy of identification which forces them to, somewhat instinctively, connect the artist’s vision with national iconography. By contrasting the very fixed form of the national emblem with a semantically multi-layered installation, Jastrzębska poses a question about the moment when our perception transforms an abstract, often amorphous object into a symbol, an icon - something sacred. This aspect of the artist’s piece leans towards theoretical reflection and is balanced by what, so to speak, resounds as socio-political commentary. Jastrzębska herself suggests such an interpretation: “According to ornithologists, the emblem of Poland represents a bird hybrid: it has elements of different birds. However, it is closest to a species of eagle called the orłan which has nothing in common with the white eagle that generations of Polish people have been taught about in schools.”[1]

   

  The deconstruction of the character of the national symbol goes hand in hand with casting doubt upon the uniformity of national identification. The hybridity of the eagle thus becomes a metaphor on nationality seen as a social construct whose basis is the desire to belong - a wish for collective identification; a dream about a stable and undeniable core of identity, which can quickly transform into a mechanism of social oppression.

   

  This deconstruction of identity, which Jastrzębska treats as one of key issues to discuss through her work is even better represented by the second piece shown at the Absolwent exhibition. Where "Godło" discusses national identification, Pożegnanie is a comment on the problems of individual identity and the existential character of memory, which is one of the pillars of identity. The exhibition’s catalog contains a quote from the book An Anthropology of Image by Hans Belting which guides us towards embracing the notion: “Our memory is itself a neural system of fictitious memory places specific to the body. It is comprised of convolutions of sites wherein we search for images that are the fabric of our memories.” [2]

   

  Five objects modelled out of bitumix make up the installation. They are the aforementioned ‘images’ - the afterimages of memory. They follow us from the past, but lose the sharpness of their meaning, becoming impossible to accurately identify. The book, the flag, the model plane, the crossed crutches and the small human figurine - each of them creates its own network of associations and potential memorial narratives. Jastrzębska’s sculptures are like memory debris - phantoms of multiple meanings that you can look at through the two great forms of memory of the last century: nostalgia and trauma. The open book can be both a youth’s secret-keeper or a forbidden work like “Mein Kampf”. The crossed crutches could symbolise disability or thankful appreciation. However, "Pożegnanie" eludes both the nostalgic and the traumatic. Nostalgia is, as Marek Zaleski tells us, the way of looking at a world grounded in subject.[3] That is why it is an identity-based strategy of looking at the past, of looking at what was irrecoverably lost. Nostalgia, paradoxically, includes the wish to forget, for it opens the path to mythicizing the past, giving it the character of an ever-unreachable ideal. Walter Benjamin, one of those who were most plagued by the obsession of memory, expressed this fundamentally perverse craving in the following way: “We cannot fully recover forgotten things. Maybe that’s good. The shock of recovery would be so destructive that in one moment we would stop understanding what we are missing. And in this way we understand it - the better, the deeper what is forgotten lies within us.”[4] Forgetting thus becomes the basis for identity: the more what is lost is shrouded in memory, the more particular a tale it demands. As time goes by, the nostalgic myth of the past intertwines distant events and severed stories, connects anecdotes and fragments of strangers’ memories, creating a tale which carries the identity of the nostalgiac.

   

  The model of nostalgic existence is therefore narration, while Jastrzębska presents the memory scraps as severance, discontinuity and fragment. It would seem that such a perspective could lead towards a traumatic experience of the work. You could assume that the black sculptures of Jastrzebska are an artistic vision of a traumatic memory: denied and concealed in the chasm of unmemory - a memory whose occasional glimpses reach the subject’s consciousness and thus disturb their sense of security by eliciting the dread of facing something that has been rejected. This impression can be further strengthened because "Pożegnanie" was inspired by the prose of Ernest Hemingway, and it was first exhibited in the year 2014 - one hundred years after the onset of World War I. However, this interpretational clue seems only partially helpful in experiencing the sculptures of the Gdańsk-based artist. For trauma, despite narrative cracks and gaps that are characteristic of it, is a state of decay of what used to be constant and stable. A traumatic memory is the ruin of narration. Jastrzębska models the shards of memories, which, emerging from the depths of forgetting, only “wait” for a tale about themselves. Both nostalgia and trauma remain in a close connection with the narrative. The former constantly adds colour, musing more stories and made-up anecdotes. It builds the subject’s identity. The latter is a post-disaster state, the radiation of an Event which prevents one from building a tale again. Pożegnanie belongs, however, to an opposite memorial order. It “takes place” in the domain of potentiality and can evoke both nostalgic imagination and traumatic glimpses. Jastrzębska’s sculptures forward you to the pre-discursive pattern, they are a raw material, a memorial prefabricate, which only then calls for processing and enclosure in a narrative frame.

  There is a short (barely a minute long) found footage movie implemented in "Pożegnanie". It is comprised of stills from war movies that depict silent, saddened characters staring at some point that is not visible to the viewer of the piece. In the recording, shown on a small tablet screen, you can see Hollywood movie stars - James McAvoy or Matt Damon from "Saving Private Ryan". The confrontation of mysterious sculptures with a video narrative that imposes a clear interpretation leads to the key feeling of Jastrzębska’s piece. The artist is interested, it seems, in the moment when the scattered fragments of memories begin to form a story, especially, what is influence on the shape of that story by phantasms stuck in consciousness, imaginary clichés and iconic representations imprinted onto memory. Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska wrote on this while discussing another Gdańsk-based exhibition: “cultural narrative patterns obtained from literature, cinema or television are superimposed on stories with a biographical character,” she proved, calling forward theses of Harald Welzer. “For example: war veterans littered their histories with episodes whose origin could be traced to movies. The Hollywood staple of salvation at the last minute became a frequent thread. When passing our biography onto another in the process of communication, we have a habit of implementing pre-rendered narrative patterns, sometimes as old as the epics of Homer.” [5].

  "Pożegnanie" emerges in this perspective as an artistic study of the distortion of memory of a twofold kind. The first is the fragmentation and incompleteness of memory, and the second - the danger and urge to place them within a known narrative format that would serve as the basis for identification. The Gdańsk artist keeps the viewer suspended. She shows the moment of moving from scattered memory debris to what has passed: making the viewer aware of the impossibility to reach the past in its pure form that has not been infected by the amassing of imaginary clichés. By presenting a peculiar relationship of memory and imagination, Jastrzębska points to the uncertainty that is inexorably linked with memory - a quality that, for fear of disintegration of our identity, we try to hide even from ourselves.

   

  Many issues are intertwined in the artist’s newest piece - "Vergessenheit". Those connected with the problem of collective identification, but also on memory and forgetting that draw shaky boundaries of personal identity. By placing it in the current gallery space of a former shipyard building, Jastrzębska seems to be asking about the way in which the Shipyard functions in the consciousness of the inhabitants of Gdańsk. The demands of the Solidarity movement that was founded here led to not only democratic changes, but in the long run also to the fall of the shipyard itself, and its marginalisation in terms of the professional and social life of the city’s inhabitants. The artist thus draws the metaphor of a palimpsest to describe the way we think about a place and its history. Jastrzębska asks the question if the history of the city, continually overshadowed by newer versions and fresher layers, can make the shipyard - in some abstract future - achieve the rank of a solidified memorial statue, which will become an empty sign. It would then not as much keep the memory of shipyard events, but absolve us of the imperative to constantly rework and reinterpret their active memory. Would the shipyard then stop being a symbol of Gdańsk? Could it mutate from a focal point of Gdańsk identity to a slogan robbed of its meaning? It is not an accident that the title of the exhibition is the German word for ‘forgetting’, for the idea of the shipyard being forgotten, unrealistic at first glance, is not less unbelievable than suggesting eighty years ago that the city would lose its German character. The figure of the urban palimpsest enclosed in metaphorical frames displays a dual nature: over time older layers are fading, while also being retained. The Shipyard, like the German character of Gdańsk, will forever be etched in the history of the city, but the strategy to access those historical assets will be constantly changing. There is a scene in one of Stefan Chwin’s books, where a character peels wallpaper off a wall only to discover German newspapers stuck underneath. The metaphor of denying unwanted past is obvious here, and maybe the shipyard is condemned to such a random path of access. On the other hand, maybe it will not be accident, but archeological work of historians and the engagement of few passionate people that will ensure the shipyard’s survival in the outskirts of social awareness. “Vergessenheit” emerges as a study of disappearance and the unavoidable erasure of memory about the shipyard from the living tissue of Gdańsk identity. Going from identifying with it to the abstraction of a symbol that denotes nothing.

  The artist’s newest sculpture has a different character as well - a more individual one. “Vergessenheit” references the so called ‘original unmemory’ of the first years of life that do not register in the memory and are thus condemned to be forgotten. It is not without meaning that the aforementioned issues are brought up by an artist born in the year 1987 - two years before the fall of communism. An event which she of course cannot remember. Jastrzębska is a representative of a generation which can choose its own story of communism, though told through (pop-)culture clichés. This is the generation which has to choose between either the messianic narrative of martyrdom for their national story - the one that grows in strength each anniversary of the declaration of martial law; or the sentimental story digested by TV programmes - on the charms of floor-to-ceiling furniture and human relationships forged in long queues. “Vergessenheit” is also about that - placing the shipyard and its bygone era in personal stories.

   

  The sculptures of Martyna Jastrzebska are testimonies of uncertainty, the anatomic studies of collective identity and strategy of identification. They are objects that delve into the structures of imaginary phantasms, which, by deconstructing existing patterns and clichés, ask questions about the mechanisms of their forming and also about what remains from seemingly constant identity once the artificially stacked layers have been torn away. Jastrzębska creates sculptures consciously wrapping them in diverse interpretational contexts. As she does so she does not fall into the trap of assuming a patronising tone or recycling the common theses of humanist studies. This is what elevates her pieces as projects that have been fundamentally thought-processed, while at the same time touching upon the most important themes of existence.

   

  Gdańsk; July 2015

   

   

  [1] Absolwent. Po Akademii – płynne tożsamości (Graduate. After the Academy – fluid identities) [exhibition catalogue], ed. A. Mandziejewski, Gdańsk 2015, p. 39.

   

  [2] H. Belting An Anthropology of Image, trans. M. Bryl, Kraków 2007, translated into English from Polish, as quoted in Absolwent

   

  [3] M. Zaleski, Formy pamięci, Gdańsk 2004, p. 15

   

  [4] W. Benjamin, Berlińskie dzieciństwo na przełomie wieków (Berlin Childhood Across the Ages), translated by B. Baran, Warszawa 2010, p. 121

   

  [5] M. Saryusz-Wolska, Pamiętać historię (To Remember History), [in:] Strażnicy doków/Dockwatchers [exhibition catalogue], ed. A. Szyłak, Gdańsk 2006, p. 21.

• 
  
  Don’t look back

  by Professor Grzegorz Klaman

   

  When we look at others we often forget to turn our gaze upon ourselves – into ourselves. We fail to look at our own stranger. We are hosts to apparitions and monsters hidden deep within, and we guard ourselves against anyone discovering them. For it might be the key to assuming control over us and our bodies.

  When pulled away, suddenly, from a nightmare, we can almost touch the ghosts of our dreams as their remains disintegrate into limbo. Jastrzębska manages to model and clearly display these ghosts – realise them within space and matter. The whirling objects, their overlapping sights – the pictures that blur the lines create a shifting and stretching black mass of afterimages.

  (…) multiplying and fusing of images, however incomplete or relative those may be, creates an opportunity to show what, fundamentally, cannot be seen. The first and simplest way to reveal something that eludes us is to focus, counter-intuitively, on its invisibility, through simultaneous fusing of many angles and times of the same phenomenon. [1]

  This remark by Gorges Didi-Huberman allows us to somewhat understand an aspect of Jastrzębska’s construction of a space for the eye, where perception shifts from item to item in a chaotic effort to recognise the surrounding shapes. The author thus poses a question on the necessity of abolishing the fossilised vision of an item – the sculpture. We move in a space that is devoid of gravity, like in a black hole, where the laws of physics are suspended. Even recognisable objects such as skulls, chairs, birds, a cradle, a shotgun or disembodied hearts, do not have predictable positions assigned to them in space. The peculiar matter of the objects (the author’s iconic ‘bitumix’ – bitumen glues and masses) suggestively “sticks” the objects together, “sticks” them to our very sight.

  The aforementioned fusing and overlapping of pictures is countered by an organic stickiness that elicits fear and disgust, for we do not know if the mass of items emerged from a swamp, or if it is matter merged together as a result of a fire that melted tissue with the surrounding air. We do not see objects as resulting from a natural process, we fear we are being pulled into a reality of horror and catastrophe or unknown physical states that we cannot contain. Unless it is a voodoo ritual wherein we enable the processes of the unexplainable and magical, which need not defend us against unforeseen consequences.

  Jastrzębska has been expanding her references. They are no longer intimately personal objects, but as in the “Godło” project (English – Emblem) on display in the Wyspa Art Institute, references to political identifiers, when known semantic representations stop making sense through the process of warping the familiar into its wraith. The author calls on the function of “unmemory” as a reservoir of new interpretations in the sphere of social identification. Kantor’s reinterpreted “Class” is a situation of reviewing reality after losing balance, according to Heidegger it is a kind of “run thorugh” of how artefacts affect us and our consciousness. The world is a mass of interactive tools that create us and our imagination. We can talk of the concept of the “expanded mind” which finds form in the world, against the world, in submersion.

  From this perspective, Jastrzębska’s activities are an effort to create a particular situation, not only a space, which serves the humble (or perhaps outstanding) function of foreshadowing an imminent experience. The splitting of our essence, which reconstitutes itself and finds anew can lead us to an unrecognised reality.

  Roger Caillois described conventional realities:

  “the body is separated from the spirit, the unit pierces the boundary of the skin and lives on the other side of its senses. It tries to look at itself from every point in space. It feels becoming the space, a dark area where there is no room for objects. It is both similar and unlike something. It seeks spaces it occupies “convulsively”. [2]

  Undoubtedly Jastrzębska uses the language of sculpture to deepen its function, defy its objective structure, and through her projects of the last several years she slightly twitches the veil between a parallel reality. The recognisable particles of the perceivable contain potential of new connections, and like in quantum physics, they are impossible to predict and thus intriguing – this is where we are invited

   

  Gdańsk; April 2014

   

   

  [1] Georges Didi-Huberman Images in Spite of All

   

  [2] Hal Foster, The Return of the Real