Attempt, the Absence of Work: The Report on a Polish Art Project Volume 6 - Issue 4

Szymon Wróbel*

• University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Received:January 06, 2022;   Published: March 03, 2022

Corresponding author: Szymon Wróbel, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

DOI: 10.32474/JAAS.2022.06.000244

 

Abstract PDF

Abandonment

“Creativity in the absence of work “may become the most characteristic feature and gesture of contemporary art. Today, the artist repeats the act of creation, but to no avail, he repeats it to some extent “in vain” and “in void”. Creativity no longer leaves any permanent traces. What the word “art” wants to indicate now has to accept the permanent absence of the work. Perhaps the most visible expression of the artistic efforts of the twentieth century is the stopping or immobilization of the operation of the “artistic machine” based on the translation of the theological dictionary into the aesthetic activity of the artist. In this machine, for centuries, the artist played the role of God, creating a work-world according to his design. Let us imagine a crippled God who creates “empty”, without the material effects of his work, and we will see a contemporary artist without a work. This is not a Demiurge shaping bodies from bad matter, it is a disembodied Demon of the age of digital immateriality [1].

Michel Foucault once wrote an essay entitled Madness, the Absence of Work commenting on Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, which brilliantly foretold the coming epoch, not so much without work, but without the effects of work. For Foucault, a man without the effect of his work, without the product of work, was a mad man. Today we live in a world of generalized madness. We are all without a work. There is no longer a difference between the worker and the artist, not because of the difference in technique, but because of the emptiness captured by the effort of their hands and brain. Both the artist and the worker labor more than ever, but their effects are not obvious. The reason for this non-obviousness is not the alienation of product from work, or even outright exploitation. The reason is that they both put their trust in the pure notion of activity. The abandonment or immobilization of the “artistic machine” means giving up some anthropological claim. It was an aspiration to a strictly human form of activity, inherited from the gods, which through work is fulfilled in the work. Man is no longer a homo creator; he is rather the victim of his source impotence and inability to create anything [2].

In a famous passage from the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguished between creation (poiēsis) aimed at an external end-the production of a work, and action (praxis) which has an end in itself - as it occurs in case of political action. Between these two models of activity-liturgy and performance form a third, hybrid type in which the action itself appears as a work. The term energeia itself is surely an invention of Aristotle, as is the division of arts into arts in effect, such as painting and sculpture, which produce something, and artesactuosae, such as music or poetry, which fulfill or rather “burn out” in activity itself. The modern artist, unlike the Greek craftsman, is not someone with the potential or the ability to create. The artist is no longer like the God of classical theologians who takes up work because he knows how and why he wants to produce something. Artists, i.e., every poet and painter, carpenter, shoemaker, flutist, and every human being - are not mysterious cases of creative power, possessors of the ability to act or create works; rather, they are animals which, only through the use of their bodies, tools and the world around them, gain experience and shape themselves as certain forms of life [3].

In his 1941 seminar titled Metaphysics as History of Being, published in the second volume of Nietzsche’s book on philosophy, Martin Heidegger devotes an important part of his work to the transformation of the Greek concept of energeia into the concept meaning “reality” or “topicality” (Die Wandel der energeia zur actualitas) [4]. The new meaning of the term ergon, argues Heidegger, becomes the opus operandi of all transformations of the vocabulary of Western metaphysics. Ergon in the new world is no longer what is meant to be presented, what happens in work [das im Wirken Gewirkte], what is the intrigue of each action. The essence of “work” is no longer “work” [Werkheit] in the sense of the process “distinguishing the performance”, but rather the “reality” [Wirklichkeit] of the thing that governs the action. After this transformation of the meaning of the term energeia, being has become a set of facts (factitas) and the world has turned into a resource that creates factuality [5]. Following this Heideggerian track, Giorgio Agamben draws attention to a certain non-obvious coincidence between art and religion. At the Benedictine Maria Laach Abbey in Rhineland, in 1923, [6] i.e., the same year when Marcel Duchamp completes The Large Glass (Le Grand Verre), the monk Odo Casel publishes his work entitled Die Liturgieals Misterienfeier, a kind of future manifesto of the “liturgical movement. “Agamben unexpectedly juxtaposes the practices of the artistic avant-garde with the church liturgy, i.e., he sees an intriguing analogy between artistic movements and theological liturgical movements. At the core of Casel’s doctrine is the belief that liturgy, which derives its etymology from the Greek term leitourgia meaning “public work”, is a “mystery” [7]. However, “mystery” does not mean “esoteric science” or “secret doctrine. “Originally, as in the Eleusinian Mysteries, related to the cult of Demeter and her daughter Persephone, celebrated in ancient Greece, “mystery” meant practice, a kind of theatrical action, composed of gestures and words that were publicly disclosed and performed during the feast, i.e., in the timelessness. Christianity, for Casel, is therefore not a “religion” or “denomination” in the modern sense of the word, i.e., a set of truths and dogmas, it is rather a “mystery,” that is, a liturgy actio, a “performance” whose actors are Christ and his mystical the body, i.e., the Church [8].

How does Christianity, understood performatively, i.e., as “liturgy in action,” relate to art understood as the permanent “absence of work”? Is art also a liturgical action? Well, Agamben takes us from the Benedictine abbey in Rhineland to Paris at the beginning of the 20th century and notes that the subsequent manifestos of the 20th century artistic avant-garde were not directed at all “against art,” but against the incarnation of art in the work. It is as if art, driven by a self-destructive impulse, absorbed what always defined its basis: its own work and its result. What are the stages of this self-destruction of art? In a nutshell, surrealism wanted to fulfill art without abolishing it; Dadaism wanted it abolished, but not fulfilled; finally, situationism, through the lips of Guy Debord, will demand something final-”we want to abolish art to fulfill its destiny.” So, does art fulfill itself in the self-cancellation of a work of art? [9]. The question, then, is: are we witnessing these self-destructive, suicidal attacks of art against art today? Are we like moths seeking only fire capable of burning our deeds? Are works or rather “artistic projects, “awarded in the International Contest for an Experiment in Visual Arts - Attempt 4, organized by the Jan Tarasin Art Gallery in Kalisz examples of the disappearance of a work, i.e., a man’s madness without the effect of his work? Is the only possible attempt today, that is, an experiment, an attempt with an absent work? Is the resistance intended to characterize the creative act in fact a resistance not so much to reality as to the materiality of the work? What is this disappearance at work in the creative process, and in how many ways can this disappearance happen? [10].

Disappearance of a figure

Let us start with Dominik Ritszel‘s project entitled Figure study, which is a specific anthropological manifesto. The author, referring to the archival films from the Cold War period, goes back to the times of the world polarized into two opposing and hostile sides. Techniques of disciplining man, presented in the film, from the point of view of the author of the project, produce the syndrome of a mass man “devoid of properties” and all particular features [11]. The first video works included in Dominik Ritszel’s portfolio come from 2012, i.e., from the time of his studies. It is a video entitled Seeyouall, in which Dominik Ritszel used a a hidden camera to record people who were not aware that they were being watched. We do not see the faces; we only see the silhouettes themselves. In this video, we are dealing with the unexpected appearance of a character, not its disappearance. The disappearance of consciousness is synonymous with the appearance of the body to the eye of another body. Further films from 2012 are Campers and Eine kleine werke. In the first of them we observe two soldiers, in the next - a group of prisoners. In both cases they are men, essentially “male bodies” in uniforms. We already see in these projects the germ of the need to observe the body in total institutions [12]. In the video Film about school from 2014, we see a gym and boys exercising. Finally, two scenes from 2017 are two frames; in one of them there is a prisoner who performs physical exercises in his cell; in the second one we see views of empty sports fields [13]. We already feel the physical and conceptual closeness of the prison and the stadium. It is no different in the video installation entitled List of Minor Damage, Part I from 2016, where we watch frames from boxing tournaments. However, we do not watch the fight itself, we only notice the moment of rest, pause, between the rounds that the players spend in the corners of the ring, accompanied by the coach [14].

The work titled Figure study, which to some extent is a continuation of the discussed works, is basically a film collage consisting of found archival materials and the artist’s original recordings. The starting point are training films commissioned by the American government. In the first reaction, we read the project as a voice in defense of the disappearance of the “individual” and its “autonomy” in the world of mass democracy. Especially today, i.e., in the period of the rule of surveillance and control society, a world filled with the presence of multiple security devices that treat an individual as mass, population or resource, and not a citizen or a person, such a view seems to be extremely topical. Certainly, Ritszel’s narratives are a documentary, but not overtly humanitarian. It seems that their criticism goes well beyond criticizing mass society [15]. The main “protagonist” of Ritszel’s films is the human body, especially the male body, which is constantly formatted, disciplined, supervised, instructed, watched, positioned, and dressed. There is no doubt that the author of the project follows the path outlined by Michel Foucault, for whom discipline is a model of all technologies of power. Discipline has replaced the glare of torture in body formation. The body of the condemned was replaced with the bodies of prisoners, students, workers, athletes. It is not the spectacle of suffering that will become the main manifestation of power in modern times, but a theater of prohibitions, systematic observations, compulsions, incentives for multiple confessions, isolation, regulation, normalization, obligations, and the application of mental punishments. Power is born, understood as a generalized economy of supervision. The machine for hanging and tearing bodies apart has been replaced in the modern world by a machine of constant inspection, never ending disembodied torture [16].

The protagonists of Ritszel’s films are tourists, soldiers, students, athletes, prisoners, e.g. the activists of Hans Blücher‘s Wandervogel youth movement, who are doomed to discipline their bland bodies. As a result, landscapes composed of human bodies and an apparently silent and categorical background emerge. I would say that Dominik Ritszel is not talking so much about “vile bodies” or “broken bodies” but about bodies that are susceptible to training. For Ritszel, the body is never naked, it is always dressed in the glow of power, the technology of processing, blocking, investing, reworking. The body is a special object of repartition, and therefore the division and marking of units in space. Monasteries, gymnasiums, factories are mechanisms of distribution and peculiar compositions of forces in which the activity and efficiency of bodies is constantly monitored [17]. It seems that Dominik Ritszel wants to decipher the secret of power. In the light of his films, the function of acclamation and consensus generation is at the center of the political apparatus of power. If the media is such a key form of power in modern democracies, it is not only because they allow public opinion to be controlled and governed. The society of the spectacle-if we can still call contemporary democracies thus-is from this point of view a society in which power in its acclamation aspect becomes indistinguishable from government and discipline. Managing data and data about the body is a key management category in the big data age [18].

Giorgio Agamben, in opposition to Foucault, for whom power is mainly the technology of producing obedience, developed the doctrine according to which power cannot be defined solely on the basis of its ability to produce the effects of subjugation, but above all it is the ability to issue orders, it is a kind of command. Power does not fall apart when it can no longer produce obedience, but when it ceases to give orders. Power ceases to exist only when it ceases to issue orders, i.e., when the command-generating headquarters is lost. This was what happened in Germany with the fall of the Berlin Wall and in Italy after September 8, 1945.Obedience was constantly present and internalized, but command was lacking. It was enough for vulnerable bodies to become helpless bodies without command. One day I would like to see a documentary film by Dominik Ritszel about such a collapse of the command headquarters. What were the seized bodies after such a deprivation of power? Would they know what they might want? [19].

There is certainly a special relationship between acclamation and democracy, and also between acclamation and the public sphere. The body is called to constantly bow to authority. In modern democracies, acclamations have survived in the public sphere in the form of advertisements, which constitute specific instructions for using products. Our society is not so much a society of orders but of good advice. Television acts as a constant guide in all possible spheres of life, telling us how to take care of a “healthy body. “In 1967, Guy Debord diagnosed the planetary transformation of capitalist politics and the economy as “an immense accumulation of spectacles,” in which commodities and capital itself take the form of a media image. If we combine Debord’s diagnosis with the thesis about public opinion as a modern form of acclamation, the problem of the society of spectacle and media domination will take a new form [20]. The essence of supervision over the body in techno-capitalism comes down to unprecedented concentration, the multiplication of the “function of respect” as the center of the political system. What was once limited to the spheres of liturgy and rituals is now overflowing in new media. We are constantly called to stand up and sign new declarations of loyalty. The new body is a body that is inscribed in existing body images. It is a body not so much supervised, but formatted and digitized. Modern democracy is a democracy based entirely on the effectiveness of acclamation, multiplied and disseminated by the media. As a result, we begin to better understand the meaning of modern definitions of democracy as “government by producing consent” or “consensus” [21].

However, it suffices, again after Agamben, to recall that the concept of “consensus” appears for the first time in the technical context of public law in a key passage in Res Gestae Divi Augusti, where the author summarizes the concentration of constitutional powers conferred on him. The deeds of the divine Augustus is the first public biography of the ruler, it is the first form of future public relations, all future propaganda, regardless of whether it is Stalinist or liberal-democratic. Consensus is a “modern form of acclamation,” expressed either by the physical presence of cheering crowd-bodies or by the flow of communication procedures within modern digital technologies and rich populations grouping together in community forums. Consensual democracy, which Debord called “the society of the spectacle,” in which Dominik Ritszel saw only a body-formatting factory, is a democracy in which the economy has freed itself from liturgy and ceremonies, absolutizing control and communication, permeating every area of social life. There is no sport, only the ideology of susceptible bodies. There are no schools, only the ideology of susceptible brains. There are no factories, there is only the ideology of effective hand actions, no intellectuals, only an audit of their brains.

Feast

When dealing with Monika Drożyńska’s project called Tablecloth, at first glance we move from the sphere of everyday life to the sphere of the holy day. Monika Drożyńska speaks of Sunday, i.e., she refers to the celebration of life and the symbol of the table as a meeting place, a specific altar of holidays. The table, covered with a tablecloth, becomes in this work a symbol of the time of friendship and celebration of holidays together. But do nonworking days still exist? Is there a Sunday with a table? Is the rich man in the digital desert still capable of a holiday apart from the debauchery of constant consumption?

Monika Drożyńska works with hand embroidery and fabric. At first glance, they are very conservative materials and conservative artistic processing techniques. These conservative materials and techniques, however, serve open social criticism. The work Embroider yourself is an excellent example of a project which - as the artist declares-”documents anger with the technique of hand embroidery on fabric”. On the other hand, Rest is simply a crochet scarf, rolled up, made by the artist since 2009, in her free time, i.e., time devoted to rest. The artist makes the scarf from yarns of different colors, depending on the year, thus materializing the time with the number of crochet movements. Another project entitled A picnic bag is a two-person mat that reveals its “content” after opening a plastic bag “abandoned” on the street. The table setting set is simply a flag of the European Union, fermented in beetroot acid, mounted on a flowering tree branch. The work of Creation of the World, in turn, is a series of large-format fabrics, the elements of which were created during workshops with children who still dream of re-creating the world. The awaited disappearance of monuments is a series of postcards with erased monuments, testimonies of “great” Polish history. Finally, the work Sunday afternoon is a record of children’s “killing” games, so characteristic of Sunday excess of free time. Monika Drożyńska wants to rethink her free time, the time of creation, time after work and time before work. But what is this time? Does Monika Drożyńska work out, destroy, measure, create time? What does the artist do with time and in time?

While for the ancient’s work understood as negotium was defined negatively in relation to the contemplative life-otium; modernity seems incapable of imagining contemplation, inaction, and feasting other than as rest or denial of work. Perhaps the only model of an operation that immobilizes all human purposeful activities is poetry. What is poetry if not an operation in language and on language that deactivates and prevents communication functions in order to open them up to a new possible use? By immobilizing economic, communicative, social and instrumental activities, man demonstrates what the human body and language can do, if they are opened to new possible applications. It is for this reason that Agamben will state categorically: “Man dedicated himself to production and labor [lavoro], because in essence he is completely devoid of work [opera], because he is the Sabbatical animal par excellence.” Human life is inoperative and aimless, but it is precisely this inoperability and aimlessness that make instrumental action [operosità] possible. Probably for this reason, people’s ideas about the inactivation of all activity and the “holiday of laziness” (work holiday!) constantly return in the dreams and utopias of the West and are ruthlessly annihilated there. These images, dreams and fantasies are enigmatic relics that the economic and theological machine abandons for mechanical consumption and the continuation of the civilization of labor. Perhaps only vandalism is a political attitude that calls for constant feasting. Monika Drożyńska confesses-”Every revolution is possible after the holidays-I read such an inscription once on one of Warsaw’s walls.” And the artist adds: “We, the School of embroidery for ladies and gentlemen”, “Golden Hands,” are resting before the embroidery revolution, the crafts man shipset revolution. I am not sure if I understand the meaning of the word “crafts man shipset.” However, I certainly understand the intention to revolutionize the work of the hands.

The call to this revolution resembles the slogans of Luddism-a radical social movement from the beginning of the industrial revolution, whose representatives mainly consisted of free homeworkers, artisans, and weavers. They defended the idea of hand weaving. While a mechanical loom was used in factories, conservative weavers primarily used a hand loom that operated even after the Napoleonic Wars. They defended these looms as their own means of production, ensuring their independence. Wages in weaving were high as long as the job required high qualifications. It was not until the beginning of the 1840s that the number of mechanical looms in production exceeded the number of hand weavers. It was the end of weaving as a field of manual, highly skilled labor, requiring many days off. It was the end of Sunday. And the beginning of empty production, for nothing. It is no coincidence that Ned Ludd, the Luddite leader, became the organizer of night attacks on the weaving mills, with the purpose of destroying the looms in Manchester. Luddite activities caused losses estimated at £1.5 million at the time. In response to the wave of Luddism, the British Parliament passed the Frame-Breaking Bill in 1812, which made destroying machinery a crime punishable by the death penalty. The memory of this event has survived in the works of Monika Drożyńska. Perhaps she too would encourage us to destroy our digital devices-smartphones, tablets, palmtops-the material cause of our intellectual and affective sterilization.

Fire

Now let’s take a look at the project by Paulina Łuczak, Untitled, which perfectly reveals the relationship between the creation process and the destruction process. This relationship is behind every creative intent, but it was perhaps the most painfully portrayed by Lars von Trier in his acclaimed 2018 movie The House That Jack Built. Calling a work into existence and the act of canceling the work go hand in hand here. Each creation is an act of destruction. We are descending into a realm where life and death are a function of the arbitrary decision of capricious power. Contrary to the sadomasochistic imagination of Lars von Trier, Paulina Łuczak is on the side of solidarity with what has been doomed to death, nonexistence, and oblivion. The artist reminds us that each work has its obverse and reverse, front and back. Paulina Łuczak’s works are not only made of ash, but they are also not only photosensitive, open to loss or even destruction, fragile, they are actually made of ash. The artist looks at phenomena and events before these phenomena, people, figures, bodies and matter completely burn out. Her domain is memory, which is constantly burning, incinerating.

If the act of creation were only a potential for creation that could self-transform into action, art would become a mechanical realization of this potential, which would strive for form with false certainty. Contrary to this belief, virtuosity is not formal perfection, but on the contrary: it is the preservation of potential in the act, stopping impotence and imperfections in defective form, prephase, para-act. There is always resistance in masterful painting or writing. This resistance is the kind of mannerism that is present in every work. Every critical art is based on the act of creation as an act of resistance. Those who lack resistance cannot help but act. Politicians are unstoppable people. The artist restrains himself. People who are devoid of resistance cannot do anything.

Dante summarized this character of his work in one verse from Paradise (Paradiso 13.77-78), writing: l’artista / Ch’ a l’abito de l’arte ha manchétrema, which should probably be translated as: “an artist accustomed to the craft has a trembling hand. “Hence, an artist is someone whose voice is trembling, whose eyelid is trembling, whose lips are trembling. The artist is the trembling itself. The artist is endless stage fright. Dante’s sentence is, in a sense, a prophecy that is fulfilled in a later work by Titian, as evidenced in particular by images such as the Annunciation. The latter is located in the Church of San Salvador in Venice. The painting shows the scene described in the Gospel of Luke. God sends Archangel Gabriel to Mary to announce the birth of the Son conceived by the Holy Spirit. Titian shows a categorical resistance to tradition. Instead of slowly entering the chamber, the Angel reveals himself to Mary on a cloud among the angelic group. Mary is kneeling near the vase in which we see burning flowers, which is a reference to the parable of the burning bush that Moses saw in the desert. Titian, in order to emphasize the specific nature of the act of creation, creates a flame on the surface of the canvas, which, however, was not completely absorbed by the fire. Here is a picture of the creative potential that burns without exhausting itself. Titian’s hand trembles, but that trembling is the ultimate composure. The fire burns, but it does not burn to ashes. It is extremely interesting that in 1978, Guy Debord, mentioned here many times, also returns to the idea of nocturnal animals, to the idea of a moth burned by fire. It is not fireflies that produce their own light, but moths that fascinate the artist, moths that seek death in daylight. Guy Debord notes: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, which I translate as: We walk in the middle of the night, consumed by fire. Perhaps Paulina Łuczak would sign this confession. Perhaps Paulina Łuczak’s photosensitivity is so great that the light of day burns her work to such an extent that it remains untitled, but not without a message.

Dreaming Nature

The project that I would like to tell you about now is a work by Karolina Zielazek-Szeska entitled Dreamers. Karolina Zielazek- Szeska is already well known for the Panoptikon project, which won Chris Schwarz Doors competition organized by the Galicia Jewish Museum. In Pantoptikon, the artist designed an installation in which the person in the center is both a guard and a prisoner. It seems that the demons known from Dominik Ritszel’s works are returning here. This time, however, we are dealing with art directed towards nature, where the intention of the author of the project is complemented by an undesigned, unintentional and difficult to control “cooperation” with the world of nature. Dreaming nature is a dreaming beauty. It is nature itself, Gaia, who can dream the work-world. But can nature be a subject, a cooperating factor in artistic creation? What is nature today anyway? Is Nature-Artist what comes after the Artist’s nature disappears?.

Without a doubt, what drives us people crazy today is the enigmatic state of nature, which is in a state of permanent instability. Merely invoking the concept of “nature” no longer soothes, and there is certainly no return to a benevolent nature. In fact, one must agree with Bruno Latour that the key questions are: how not to deanimate nature? How not to naturalize and objectify Nature? Even the disasters themselves are no longer natural. Even pandemics are laboratory-made. The climate system that raised us and trained us everything we now recognize as human culture is dead. So what is nature today? Is nature the goddess Gaia? Nature is certainly not “the great chain of being”; she is not a goddess who watches over the global plan, ordering the connection of multiple factors, entities, a great concatenation of agents. Nature is not a huge anthill. Rather, nature is a density of connections. Whether we are talking about nature, earth, globalization, capitalism, or about God as the nature of things, each time we assume the existence of a super-organism, super-rationality, higher providence. This is a mistake. The traversal of the connections is not replaced by the relation between the parts and the whole, and the latter is not higher instance or the sum of all parts. The whole does not mean something above or all-encompassing; rather, it means greater numbers, mass communication. What happens in times of massive communication between objects? Well, unpredictable things happen.

It is no longer possible today to refer to the “balance of nature,” the “wisdom of Gaia,” and even to its relatively stable past, as a force capable of restoring order to a thermally and climatically unsettled world. One should probably turn to Lars von Trier again, this time in a movie entitled Melancholia from 2011.The plot is partly about a stray planet called Melancholia, which threatens to collide with Earth. This threat reveals how the heroes, each isolated from the rest of the world, will react to the catastrophe. The film shows how it is impossible to escape from the excessive burden on the globe today. To put an end to the mortality of the globe - falsely held by the force of Atlas-we must stick to spherology and therefore to the place of stay. Contrary to the formula “think globally, act locally,” no one has ever been able to think globally about Nature. Globality is never anything but the fabric of many localities. I hope Karolina Zielazek-Szeska would agree with this statement.

The installation entitled Birds from Heiligenhaffen by Karolina Zielazek-Szeska from 2017 is a story about nature in a state of decay and production at the same time. The seagulls in Heiligenhafen - a holiday village on the North Sea next to a nature reserve - are no longer birds, but instead a part of the global reserve, a planetary zoo. They are gulls not so much born of organic matter but constructed of clay. In this installation, “the work of nature” meets the “work of human hands” created in clay. But how do these two worlds meet? The human hand searches for and finds new forms in nature-stone and says something more, glues onto it, expands it by using ceramic material to add “missing parts” to birds. This new generation of birds, brought into existence by the artist, goes beyond traditional oppositions such as-motion-stillness, hard-soft, nature-culture, born-created, artificial-material, and phenotype-genotype. Nature is no longer frozen in motionless forms of species but liquefied in the infinite changeability and fluidity of forms. Changeability is the new deity. It is no coincidence that in the artist‘s installation, civilization awakens from flint. Flint, however, as a material for making tools, weapons and for striking fire, launched a great movement: the lightning of civilization. Now the artist is kissing the dreaming Nature and tries to reawaken her, activate, fertilize her, pierce her with lightning.

It is interesting that even Charles Darwin, in his famous book on the emergence of new species, begins by introducing the category of variations as the leading category for his argument, writing-“[…] It has been seen […] that amongst organic beings in a state of nature there is some individual variability; indeed, I am not aware that this has ever been disputed.” The only dispute concerned such variability which takes the individual beyond variability frozen in the form of the species; thus, the variability which enables the formation of a new species from an existing one was negated. It is precisely this variability that interests the artist who brings to life variations on the variability of forms in nature. Karolina Zielazek- Szeska tells us: do not dream anymore, earthlings, mortals, that you are self-sufficient! You are not going to escape into space. Man, you have no place to live other than this provincial planet Earth. To you mortal, Earth is a place called hapax in Greek, a name that appears only once. Hapax is an idiom. We humans are indigenous, idiomatic species; everything that happens to us happens only once, only here. Gaia, Ge, Earth, is not a goddess, but a force from the times before the gods. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Gaia is a great force of the beginnings. Before time, a dangerous, clever Gaia emerges in moments of imbalance, uncertainty, crisis, accompanied by Chaos and Eros. First came Chaos [Yawning Gap], and then the broadbreasted Earth-Gaia.

Karolina Zielazek-Szeska, like Bruno Latour, tells us, let’s not ask what Gaja is, but what does she do? We learn from mythology that Gaia’s representations are contradictory and confused. Gaia has thousands of names, she acts as a wise counselor, but also as chthonic power, it blows hot and cold, and archaeologists have serious difficulties finding her altars. Gaia destroys all levels; she is the name of the process by which changing events and forces made subsequent processes more probable. Gaia is just a name for all interpenetrating and unpredictable consequences, a necessary name to orchestrate the multiple causative forces-agents. Karolina Zielazek-Szeska’s works feel part of this complex constellation patronized by Gaia.

A Tongue Without a Breath

Finally, I turn to Lukas Keysell’s work entitled Universal Expression on the difficult subject of universal language. First of all, it seems that the universal language, as perceived by the artist, would no longer be a tool for dividing but for connecting communities, nations, cultures and lifestyles. The author of the project aims at surprising spatialization of signs, symbols, linguistic notations and writing. Moreover, the author consistently searches for universal components of human and non-human communication. The imposition of linguistic symbols in his work produces the archetype of universal language and of what is common to all cultures. Universal Expression is free speculation about what language can become in connection with the use of virtual and augmented reality. It is a hidden scenario of future events, the future of writing. The author predicts that writing will become a drawing situated in a three-dimensional environment. Therefore, breaking down language barriers will be achieved with the use of new technologies. So do we have a kind of techno-utopia here after techno-skepticism? What is a universal language that goes beyond local particularisms? Is it not only a postulate of unity? How does the author try to convince us that it is not just a fiction or the effect of the domination of digital technology?

Already in his work entitled Architeketon, Lukas Keysell emphasized the power of architecture as art which is by definition public, and which creates the public sphere. Architeketonis a work which moves us back in time to emphasize the etymology of the word “architect.“ The artist wants “Architecture to come closer to sculpture, and sculpture to come closer to architecture. “But ca language gets closer to architecture, like sculpture? Playing with convention and focusing on the future fate of objects is already visible in the work Kryptos, also a speculative project that predicts the situation in 2025. Here the artist tries to rethink the problem of imitation, ie counterfeiting of luxury goods; it creates a new language that acts as an ever-changing lock “written” on the label of luxury items. Perhaps, then, it is the work that turns into a linear linguistic creation, and not language into a three-dimensional work of architecture? The Life of a Modular Alien project from 2017 introduces us to the “modular existence”-alien passengers of our electronic devices. We are attacked not so much by Martians, as by modular creatures, born as pen drawings. These creatures transform and mature into digital form when they “pass” through the scanner, “settle” in the USB memory, “register” in the computer’s memory. Some of these lives will remain trapped in your computer forever as a JPEG file, with no way to escape. However, the lucky few are “chosen for salvation”, i.e., return to “real life” through “screenshots. “Surely Lukas Keysell is playing here with the double reality of all life - we are analog (protein-based) as phenotypes and we have a linguistic, digital nature, encoded in the depths of DNA, programming language, storage, repeated reproduction, as genotypic beings. So where are we, on which side can we be found?

Lukas Keysell designs worlds which are no longer part of the traditionally understood biosphere, but rather belong to the infosphere, i.e., the environment created by information beings, and their properties, interactions, conversion processes, and communication. For Keysell, the infosphere became a synonym for reality. For only what is based on information, not matter or energy, is real. As a result, we become strange e-citizens-e-inhabitantsinforgs (connected informational organisms). The physicist John Archibald Wheeler proposed the radical it from bit (all from bit) hypothesis, according to which information underlies all matter, and every “it,” that is, every particle or energy field, is an organization of differences and therefore information. I think Lukas Keysell would be happy to use that inspiration. The work entitled Karen Broe Pedersen, which tells about the life of the artist’s deceased mother, is certainly noteworthy. Karen was a maniacal archivist, storing everything from train tickets to successive job applications. A journal has become a storage place for this information and evidence of life.

Thanks to conversations with the sister of the deceased mother, the artist managed to reconstruct, with remarkable precision, the whole life of his mother. However, the viewer asks himself: what is this life and who is this life for? Is “life in the archive”-paper or digital-a real, organic life worth living? It should also be added that the interest in the script was already revealed in the work of Hamilton Display from 2019, in which the artist creates an experimental typeface used for interaction between various agents. Here, too, questions arise as to whether writing can become a battlefield of various forces, semantic fields, and lexical vectors?. So what is language for Lukas Keysell? And does the artist assume the role of translator of many languages? Like Walter Benjamin, should one ask what is the translator’s job? And does not the translator’s task, his mission doom him to a constant failure of translation? Does the artist propose a return to pictograms? Is everything, in Keysell’s interpretation, encrypted in multiple senses and cryptlanguages? Well, for Lukas Keysell, the root problem of language is not its magic, but the technique of writing it. Man is the one who gives names, himself being the name of a certain language. Giving names is the law of the language. The content of the language does not exist, the content of the language is the language itself. The translator’s work is filled with the great theme of integrating a multitude of languages into one real one. It is the language of the reconciliation of languages, that is names. It is not a language of truth, however, but a language of programming meaning.

But what do we expect from a good translation? That the translation does not obscure the primeval world, but allows the pure language to render the original even more forcefully. Lukas Keysell is looking for a clean language. He wants to save this pure language, enchanted in a foreign one, in his own language. He wants a language trapped in the world and free in the work of a threedimensional language. With this in mind, Lukas Keysell-translator and compiler breaks down the barriers of his own language. As a translator, he does not record the contingent state of his own language but tries to set it in motion because of a foreign language - and artificial. However, is pure language more present in the translation than in the original? After all, the original is always in a constant movement of defragmentation, it is in exile, in an eternal journey, in wandering. Is the translator able to break this process?. Stéphane Mallarmé once argued that the imperfection of languages is due to the lack of a perfect language: languages allow you to think without accessories, to think in a whisper, but in silence they still search for an immortal word, and in the variety of idioms they prevent paraphrasing a word that remains unique, disposable, only materially true .Just like our stay on earth in terms of Latour and Karolina Zielazek-Szeska. There are mute languages - the languages of things and the languages of life that have received a breath. Can architectural languages, Lukas Keysell’s artificial languages, ever receive a breath?

Suspending Hope

The expression of 2020 will surely remain George Floyd’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” as an accusation not only of the whole of America, but of the whole world. We are all no longer able to breathe normally, our planet is no longer breathing. The Covid-19 pandemic is shaking the world - it certainly is. However, this earthquake, which is the reason for another attempt at domestication of man under the banner of a global lockdown, only reveals a long-felt crisis. Is there any hope then, not to mention the principle of hope? Well, instead of talking about hope, we would have to discover a rather subtle way of “dis-hoping”; it does not mean “despair”, but rather not trusting “hope” itself as a way to deal with the passage of time. Perhaps, in order to regain the new realism, we must set aside the pseudo-realism that supposedly portrays people working tirelessly for survival.

Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means constantly cooling down, as breathless dogs do. If we want to survive, the temperature must be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, carrying heat away from the skin so that the heart can continue to pump blood. Climatologists predict that at seven degrees warming, this cooling would become impossible for parts of the planet’s equatorial band, especially the tropics, where humidity is an increasing problem. After a few hours, the human body would simply be cooked. If a warming of eleven or twelve degrees Celsius occurs, more than half of the world’s population will die from direct overheating. We are preparing for a world in which we will have to live in unbreathable air. We can no longer breathe freely, to the fullest. Human optimism, a kind of age of naiveté, is over. What is left? What remained is a world after work, without a work, a rehearsal without a work of art. We earthlings already know that earth is our only planet, but that one planet is no longer breathing fully.

Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, in their book Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, outline three variants of the political future. First, the variant that is called the “climate Leviathan,” that is, a new social contract, defined by a positive attitude towards capitalism and a negative one towards national sovereignty. Capitalism, in this variant, survives even the heat death of the Earth, although the nation state does not. A supranational parliament is being born, trying to convince us that the climate crisis is just a local obstacle, an anomaly, in the construction of extraterrestrial business. Second, we have a variant of the “climatic Behemoth,” defined by the mutual support of capitalism and the nation-state: capitalism crosses the boundaries of our planet, under the patronage of local state interests. Finally, a variant known as “climate Mao,” i.e., a system defined by benevolent but authoritarian and anti-capitalist leaders exercising power within the boundaries of existing nations. I do not share any of these visions. We need something else. We need a new “natural contract,” not a social one. We have to accept that “the Earth is moved. “The eternal, motionless Earth that has provided the conditions and foundations for our life so far is moving. The foundation of the Earth trembles. The earth “is agitated”, it “reacts.” If we accept “Earth‘s movement” we should not be surprised that the new form of governance must take into account the agency of non-human factors.

It is not proposing a new animism or a return to the magical state of humanity. On the contrary, we propose to consider the “force of attraction,” the force of gravity, as the basic bond that would allow us to understand what “force of law” and “will understand” mean. To understand is to grasp it, to comprehend something; is there a better way to grasp something than to submit without resistance to the influences, i.e., the echo (echoes) of all other forces? Perhaps after such understanding we will also regain the ability to breathe. Perhaps we will also regain the power to create. Dominik Ritszel’s body differently formatted, Monika Drożyńska’s free time differently designed, the photosensitive memory of Paulina Łuczak, the dreaming and active nature of Karolina Zielazek- Szeska, the three-dimensional universal language of the translator and programmer Lukas Keysell, want a different understanding, different life, different work, different speech-apart from Leviathan, apart from Behemoth, apart from Mao. They want to breathe fully, they want to rediscover the stolen world. They are all moved by the movement of the Earth.

References

1. Michel Foucault (2006) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. R. Howard. New York: Random House; Michel Foucault, Madness and unreason. A preface, (in) idem, History of Madness, trans. J Murphy, J Khalfa, London: Routledge, 2006. Michel Foucault, Madness, the Absence of Work (d'œuvre), A I Davidson (ed.), Foucault and his Interlocutors. London and Chicago: Chicago University Press, USA.
2. Aristotle (2002) Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Ch. Rowe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, UK.
3. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche I-II, Erste Auflage, Verlag G Neske, P Fullingen (1961) English translation: Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche vol 1. The Will to Power as Art (trans)David F Krell, Harper, Row (1979), New York, USA.
4. Giorgio Agamben (2019) Archeology of the Work of Art. Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, United States.
5. Odo Casel (1922) Die Liturgie als Mysterienfeier, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder.
6. Guy Debord (1997) Society of the Spectacle, Detroit, MI: Black and Red.
7. Michel Foucault (1995) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (trans) A Sheridan, Random House New York, USA.
8. Giorgio Agamben (2011) The Kingdom and the Glory. For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Homo Sacer II, 2) trans, L Chiesa, Stanford California, USA.
9. Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Res Gestae divi Augusti (2009) [The Deeds of the Divine Augustus]: Text, Translation and Commentary, (ed) A E Cooley, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
10. Giorgio Agamben (2011) The Kingdom and the Glory. Translated by Lorenzo Chiesa, Matteo Mandarini. Stanford University Press pp. 1-328.
11. Robert Skidelsky (2018) Will the population become redundant? Eurozine. Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Fall/Winter.
12. (2013) In the English translation, we find the appropriate fragment: “Clear the wax to perfection and return; the heavens to where their powers are at the peak: then you will see the seal in fullest shine; But nature always comes up lame and weak, works like an artist with a trembling hand who falters, though he knows his art’s technique. But when the ardent Love has brought to bear the Wisdom of the primal Power, and sealed, every perfection is embodied there “Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, trans. A. Esolen, New York: Modern Library.
13. Guy Debord (2003) Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, and Documents. (Ed) Ken Knabb, AK Press, United Kingdom.
14. Bruno Latour (2017) Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Malden, MA: Polity, Cambridge, UK.
15. Bruno Latour (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press [1999].
16. Charles Darwin (1859) The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. J Murray London.
17. Luciano Floridi (2014) The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford University Press, UK.
18. Walter Benjamin (1913-1926) On Language as Such and on the Language of Man. (Trans) E Jephcott, Selected Writings 1: 1913-1926. Edited by M Bullock, M W Jennings. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge/London pp. 62-74. Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator, (trans) H Zohn, Selected Writings 1(1): 253-263.
19. David Wallace Wells (2019) The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Tim Duggan Books, New York, USA.
20. Geoff Mann, Joel Wainwright (2018) Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future. Verso Books, London, UK.
21. Michel Serres (1995) The Natural Contract. Trans E MacArthur, W Paulson, University of Michigan, USA.