FEATURE Wilhelm Sasnal Interview

FEATURE
Wilhelm Sasnal
Interview: Velocity Equals Displacement Over an Interval of Time
Essay: Overturning the Everyday
Velocity Equals Displacement Over an Interval of Time
By Andrew Maerkle
Born in 1972 in Tarnów, Poland, Wilhelm Sasnal is among a new generation of contemporary artists who emerged following the
country’s transition from Communist to democratic rule in 1989. He is best known for making paintings that combine elements of representation and abstraction to depict images based on photographs that he takes himself or that he finds in other sources ranging from
books to films and websites.
As such, these paintings maintain a delicate balance between personal intimacy and distanced irony. Common subjects for Sasnal include his own family and experiences as well as the history of Poland and the role the country played in the Holocaust during
World War II. At other times he “documents” the landscape around Tarnów where he was raised, often using expressive brushstrokes
to communicate atmosphere through minimalist gestures, or he will obliterate key details from his source images, as with the painting Untitled (After Metinides) (2003), which blurs behind a flurry of monochrome hues everything but some figures loitering in the
background of an airplane crash site that had been photographed by the Mexican photojournalist Enrique Metinides. Yet it is hard to
say whether for Sasnal any one subject is more or less personal, or more or less ironic than the next.
What one can say is that Sasnal is a keen observer of the human environment, which is also apparent in his separate practice as a
filmmaker. Shooting primarily with a 16mm camera, Sasnal imbues his films with a painterly eye that is attune to the viscosity of action, the taffy-like bonds that hold together the plastic world. For example, in Marfa (2005), Sasnal’s camera lingers on oil that spills
out from the car he is having refurbished and seeps over the bare, fleshy torso of a gargantuan mechanic. In The Ranch (2006/07), he
is absorbed by the nonchalant barbarity of ranch hands dehorning and castrating young bulls, zeroing in on the freshly shorn testicles
frying on a makeshift grill and the men gingerly picking the sizzling meat up with their fingers.
ART iT met with Sasnal when he came to Tokyo for the opening of his solo exhibition at Rat Hole Gallery, “16mm films,” which
includes both recent paintings as well as the short films Marfa, Love Songs (2005) and Centrum (2004). He discussed with ART iT the
relationship between his films, the landscape and his paintings, as well as his youth growing up in Poland and his stance toward the
country’s history. Considering Sasnal’s practices as painter and filmmaker in tandem, it’s tempting to see him as equal parts satirist and
off-kilter ethnographer. However, the idea that the artist intends to make an overarching statement about social conditions is always
undermined by the inclusion in his works of his own subjective viewpoint.
As Sasnal told ART iT, he responds to the world through intuition, a way of seeing or feeling that circumvents the rational order of
things. His work is distinct because it finds a unique space between the trivial and significant.
Part I. Like Everyone Born in the 1940s, My Mother Was a Fan of Elvis
Wilhelm Sasnal on the role of chance in documenting the world, and the connections between film, Land Art and painting.
Installation view of Untitled (2007), 16mm film, sound, 7 min. Courtesy the artist & Hauser & Wirth, London/New York/Zürich.
ART iT: You are known both for your paintings and your 16mm films, so there’s a lot to cover when discussing your work, but I
thought we could start somewhere in the middle.
In 2007 I saw your exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Zürich where you showed an untitled 16mm film with found footage of Elvis
Presley doing a live performance of “Unchained Melody” shortly before he died. It was my first time seeing one of your films and it
left a strong impression on me. What struck me was that the film encapsulated a uniquely transitory moment in society’s relationship
to media and historical consciousness, since you were using 16mm film to document a computer with YouTube video of footage that
had been shot in 1977.
Was that part of the intent of the work?
WS: I am aware of the idea that the film has these different convergences of media, but to be honest that’s simply how I use existing
images. These images are all around us; they are part of our reality. It’s never been a particular intention of mine to criticize or play
with them. I respond to them intuitively.
The film and the paintings that were in the exhibition were more or less about Graceland. While doing a residency in the US I made
a trip to Memphis and I thought that since I was there I should see Graceland. But when you enter this empty house and see all the
tourists walking everywhere, it is profoundly sad. And from being very cynical I responded to the specificity of that place. So I made
paintings based on photographs I took of the interiors and began searching for Elvis on YouTube.
The songs in the film are both great songs. When I saw Elvis in that footage, he looked really insane. I think his insanity started quite
earlier when he became totally detached from reality, having his handlers constantly “protecting” him. That’s what led me to also
include the YouTube footage of Daniel Johnston singing “Casper the Friendly Ghost.”
ART iT: How about the film Widlik, also made in 2007, which features footage of your family at the beach alongside voice-overs recounting the story of a father who disappears from his family, and concludes with a scene of a computer on the beach playing a video
of David Bowie singing “Space Oddity”?
WS: Widlik is a type of seaweed from the Baltic Sea. I’m a bit reluctant to show the film now because I don’t like the multiple narrators, I have to go back and record one person who will narrate the whole thing. But it’s just a made-up story that started from spending time together with my family at the coast and having the camera with me the whole time - this black body of the camera - and of
course everyday quarrels about it, “You’re not playing with us!” That was how the story developed. “Space Oddity” fits at the end
because it tells a similar story, with Major Tom flying away in space. And the computer was just what I happened to have on hand at
the time.
Left: Still from Widlik (2007), 16mm film, sound, 10 min.
Right: Still from The Ranch (2006/07), Super8 film, transferred to DVD, 35 min.
ART iT: In addition to the untitled Elvis piece, you made several films during your stay in the US, including The Ranch (2006/07),
which ends with this great scene of a female TV reporter shooting a report on location underneath a highway overpass. Wearing a
mini-skirt and go-go boots, she is shown in soft-focus silhouette, and combined with the soundtrack of Vikki Carr singing the Burt
Bacharach song “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” it looks like one of those early music videos from the 1960s or ‘70s.
For me, the music accentuates the vanity of the reporter and the incongruity of her outfit at this very urban scene with a police barricade visible in the background. How much does music shape your films?
WS: Well, during my stay in the US I had a Super 8 camera with me and I filmed a lot of footage, so there is still more material that
I plan to use. For the most part the footage is casual, I just happen to be there. The story behind the reporter is interesting. I was in
Chicago, where there are large Polish and Mexican Catholic communities. Somebody noticed a stain on the wall of the underpass
and thought it was a sign from the Virgin Mary. But it was just leakage. So people came and put flowers and lit candles in front of the
stain, and I happened to be there when they were shooting the report. I think that when you turn the music off the films don’t exist. I’m
currently planning a new feature-length film about greed in a Polish village, which will also make reference to events from World War
II. When I imagine how the film will take shape I see it starting with documentary footage from the village where we will be shooting.
As I play the images in my head, I know the exact music that I want to go with that footage.
ART iT: Yes, I was going to ask about your recent feature films, do you make them by yourself or do you have crews and multiple
cameras?
WS: The films on display at Rat Hole Gallery right now are all small pieces that I did by myself without anyone around me. But in
2008 I made the film Swineherd, which centers on a swineherd who delivers clandestine letters between two young, lesbian lovers
living in the Polish countryside. That was my first advanced, complex production. The outcome was a feature film almost 90 minutes
long. Now we are finishing post-production on a second feature-length film, with a psychedelic plot set in a post-atomic reality.
Swineherd had a lot of art elements in it. There were several independent segments within the film, so I still had the excuse that it
wasn’t a proper feature film, it was experimental. With the second film there is less experimentation, and I believe the third film that
we are planning now will be a true feature film.
It’s been an ongoing process working with crews. Swineherd was totally chaotic because we were working with friends. For the second production we had a big crew but there were too many people even though it was a cheap production. There was no intimacy on
the set at all. I hope with the third film we can find the right amount of people so that it’s neither chaotic nor crowded.
ART iT: In that sense it seems that the short film Marfa (2005) is an important bridge from short to feature films as it is structured
around this black Cadillac that you have refurbished and then stripped down to create a kind of performance and communal platform
in the middle of the landscape, with a band using it as a stage and people lounging in the exposed back seat.
Left: Still from the film Swineherd (2008), 35mm film, b/w, sound, 85 min. 46 sec.
Right: Still from Marfa (2005), 16mm film, sound, 25 min. Courtesy the artist, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, and Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo.
WS: That was actually the first longer film I did where it had a certain plot that I wrote for myself.
That was a very special moment for me. I was responding to my situation during my residency in Marfa. I met this band, and I knew I
wanted this car for the film but I didn’t yet know what kind of film I was going to make. And the landscape was inspiring.
ART iT: Actually I thought the film had a subtle Land Art feel to it.
WS: That’s very good! I really like Land Art. It’s quite interesting about the land and the landscape. When I look at Old Master paintings, I love to look at the landscapes because I think these are still such incredible images. And it appeals to me because I can still see
these landscapes now. In fact my interest in Land Art led me to make several paintings about Robert Smithson.
ART iT: I wouldn’t necessarily have made the connection from simply looking at your paintings, but you put the ideas of painting,
film and Land Art together.
WS: Yes. Again, it wasn’t my intention but that’s how it happened and now I can look back and understand my interests. When I told
people I was going to Marfa they would all ask whether I was going to see Lightning Field and so on. I think it’s also a question of
whether Land Art was about making a piece in the landscape or rather emphasizing what the landscape is about.
When we went to Spiral Jetty, it was such a tiny piece. It’s not impressive if you try to separate it from the landscape. The Great Salt
Lake, that is the true piece of art. No one can compete with the landscape and its immensity.
Part II. Silent Landscapes Begin to Speak
Wilhelm Sasnal discusses visualizing history and the ‘ethos of painting.’
ART iT: Considering your admiration for Land Art, it seems notable that you have made several paintings about the landscape around
Tarnów where you grew up as well as Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale and Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film
about the Holocaust in Poland, Shoah. Why did you start making those paintings?
WS: Even though I was born in 1972, I felt that I grew up in a post-war reality. The influence of World War II in this region of the
world is inescapable. When you travel through Poland and you see all these monuments, you become aware that this soil has absorbed
a lot of blood. You cannot be indifferent to that.
But I also started using historical subjects when I realized that there was something uncool about it, at least for me personally. Prior
to that I had been totally focused on youth culture and everyday life, I wasn’t thinking about history and how to use it in art. And then
I realized that I wanted to try something that I would find uncool, to address a subject that I wouldn’t have approached before. These
paintings were somehow already inside me.
ART iT: Was there anything specific, though, that triggered the switch from youth culture to historical subjects?
WS: I made the switch around the time that people in Poland first began discussing the history in an open way. Prior to the war, Poland was home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities, and that community was completely exterminated by the war’s end.
But in school we learned only that 6 million Poles were killed during the war, no one mentioned that over half of them were of Jewish
ethnicity.
Left: Moscice 1 (2005), oil on canvas, 100 x 140 cm. Courtesy collection Fundação de Serralves – Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto.
Right: Shoah (Forest) (2002), oil on canvas, 45 x 45 cm. Photo A. Burger, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth London/New York/Zürich.
These were subjects that had been hidden for 50 years and weren’t really mentioned. But between 1999 and 2003, the Polish edition of
Maus was released and Jan T. Gross published his book Neighbors, about the Polish village Jedwabne where in 1941 the Jewish community were massacred by their neighbors. And Lanzmann’s Shoah was broadcast for the first time on Polish TV, so we could finally
see the history in a new light.
ART iT: But your strategy for the paintings based on Maus and Shoah was indirect, with key details such as figures or facial features
removed from images you were referencing. One painting that stands out in particular is Shoah (Forest) (2002), with three small figures positioned in front of a towering expanse of swirling green brush strokes.
WS: Yes, of course. I think Maus and Shoah are important works of art, and I was using these existing works to reconsider the past.
Recently Lanzmann has been back in the news because he has been engaged in public debate with the French author Yannick Haenel
about the role of the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski during the war. Karski, who escaped Poland and testified to Allied leaders
about the Nazi extermination camps, was interviewed by Lanzmann for Shoah, and is the subject of a recent book by Haenel. In his
book, Haenel accused Lanzmann of editing his interview with Karski, while Lanzmann has countered that Haenel is a historical revisionist. At stake is the credibility of Shoah as well as the relationship between fiction and documentation.
So right before I came to Japan I started re-watching Shoah, which I had recorded for myself when it was broadcast. When I got to
this scene with the three figures coming out of the forest, I had to stop the film again; it is such a strong image. The script for my new
feature-length film includes a number of scenes that take place in forest settings, and I thought, “This is a scene that has to be there in
my own film.”
ART iT: So when you watched that scene almost 10 years ago it made an impact and even now it is just as strong?
WS: Absolutely. The interesting thing about Shoah is that the film is so selfish. I mean, Lanzmann was so selfish, and I admire that.
Of course in terms of political correctness there is a controversial element to how he made the film, how he approached and interviewed these Polish peasants from the position of a French intellectual. The situation was always in his advantage and he could manipulate it. He knew what questions to ask to get the responses he wanted.
But anyways the film is a work of art. And when you see the slow movement of the camera panning across the silent landscape, it’s so
sinister, this void. This awareness of the landscape and what it bears, what’s behind it, or under it, is amazing.
ART iT: I also feel that kind of emotional resonance in your paintings - the sublime feeling of the trees and the tiny figures goes beyond a simple reproduction of an image.
WS: Yes. Behind all my paintings there is a story. That’s why I cannot say that I paint abstractions even if some of them look that way.
I have never made an abstract painting; there is always a story behind the visual elements.
ART iT: When you were doing the Maus and Shoah paintings how much thought did you put into choosing the images that you used?
WS: At that time I just responded to intuition. I can predict what images will intrigue me, and what images I can transform through the
painting into something that is even more intriguing, even more vague.
What’s interesting is that during the painting process many associations come to me, it’s like a whole story is built up again or maybe
put into a verbal language that I speak to myself as I paint. There are these links to the existing works.
Of course, some subjects are really light and I’m not going to overload them with more meaning than necessary.
Left: Shoah (2003), oil on canvas, 40 x 70 cm.
Right: Lata Walki (2005), oil on canvas, 150 x 190 cm.
ART iT: Is there a difference between Shoah (Forest) and your portrait of Robert Smithson, Untitled (Smithson) (2002), or a painting
of a toilet in a bar in Kraków?
WS: In terms of the approach to the subject, not so much. Sometimes when I want to play with existing materials or a certain form
there are differences, but I treat painting very seriously. When I have the feeling that the painting is done, I leave it. I never leave the
painting when I have doubts about it.
I’m never so cynical to think about a painting, “Maybe it’s not OK, but it’s going to sell anyway.” I am responsible to myself. I believe
in an ethos of painting.
ART IT: But clearly your definition of when a work is finished is quite broad, since in your text painting Lata Walki (2005) you ended
up cutting out the words from the canvas entirely.
WS: That was fun. Lata Walki, meaning “Years of Struggle,” was the title of a chapter from a stupid Polish war film. I really liked
that phrase, and thought it was meaningful. I tried to paint it several times but the letters never looked right. I really struggled with the
painting. I over-painted the text two or three times before I finally gave up and cut the words out.
I’m increasingly attracted to the ugliness of painting, making mistakes, collapsing. It’s partly a reaction to what I don’t like in contemporary painting.
Painting is a tough job. I could never be only a painter. Maybe that’s why I also need to make films. I’m afraid of approaching painting
on my knees, of trying to be a master, because I think it’s a waste of effort. How many paintings can you paint to prove to yourself that
you’re a master - that you’ve achieved what you wanted to achieve?
Rather than trying to reassure myself, it’s more productive to doubt myself about what I do. It’s also a reaction - not necessarily to the
market, as such - to how painters try to make catchy pieces that will be noticed by the audience. Of course I understand that I’m also
saying this from a privileged position.
ART iT: One thing that interests me is that you’ve generally resisted the urge to make monumental canvases.
WS: I think the biggest work I’ve made is 2 by 2.2 meters. That’s fairly big, but actually I cannot make anything bigger because it
wouldn’t fit through my door. In any case it’s not a particular desire of mine.
This goes back to my previous answer: I never assume that I’m going to paint a masterpiece. I work with the canvases that I have.
Amid the current flood of images in our society, I think painting is in a very special situation compared to previous ages when it was
the only way to depict the world.
I’m not so naïve to believe that painting can change the world or change people, because it is no longer a medium of “mass destruction,” as film can be. Because we have become blind to the images around us, and are so fed up with them, I think it actually returns
painting to a position similar to what it occupied in the past. It’s a way to turn images into something physical.
Part III. Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Your Grievances
Wilhelm Sasnal addresses the influence of music on his artistic development and walking the line between the trivial and significant.
Untitled (2001), acrylic on canvas, 153 x 180 cm.
ART iT: You make both paintings and films, but to what degree do you consider them separate practices?
WS: I consider them separate practices, but my reliance on intuition links both painting and filmmaking for me. Intuition is about a
way of seeing, or the way I crop the image. So when I do the films, even if I’m working with a team of people, I still hold a camera.
ART iT: The similarities are not merely visual though. I feel your paintings have a musical quality to them in the way that they combine aspects of representation and abstraction - in addition to the fact that you have painted images of musicians and album covers
- and that suggests another parallel with your films, a kind of audio-visual approach.
WS: Actually, my interest in art started through music. When I was 14 or 15 I was really into Metal music and then gradually explored
more alternative genres. It was through this exploration that I began to see how music and what you might call the “apparatus” of
music are connected to art and the “apparatus” of art.
At the same time I began to realize I had a basic artistic talent, redrawing the covers of records. It was common then for students to
have leather bags with a flat cover over the back, and that cover made a great surface for ballpoint pen drawings. I would make the
shadows with the pen and then use a razor to scratch in the light, so I could achieve a really nice effect. I did many of those backpack
drawings for myself and for my friends.
ART iT: What kind of music was making it into the country at that time?
WS: Culturally Poland was different from other Eastern Bloc countries because the government was relatively liberal, even though it
was behind the Iron Curtain.
Obviously, this was before the Internet, and we learned about music through friends or from the radio. The radio stations in Poland
actually broadcast really good stuff and we were quite up-to-date with what was happening outside of the country.
The stations would broadcast whole records at a time and the DJs would even let listeners know when they could turn their cassette
tapes to record the other side of the vinyl. There were also these stores to which you could bring your blank cassettes and then tell
the staff which records you wanted to have recorded. Quality was an issue though because sometimes by the time you had your own
recording it was already a fourth- or fifth-generation copy.
That’s how I learned about music, and probably what I was listening to was not so different from what people on the other side of the
Curtain listened to. I remember very clearly that when I was 15 I heard Bauhaus for the first time and started listening to them as well
as Joy Division and other UK bands from the ‘80s.
Left: Stereolab (2000), oil on canvas, 52 x 48 cm.
Right: Untitled (2009), oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm. Courtesy the artist, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, and Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo.
ART iT: With all these re-recordings of recordings, maybe that’s where your interest in double mediation comes from, making paintings of images and films of videos?
WS: Maybe. I remember also that at the music stores you could buy photographs - real, black-and-white photos that had been developed at a lab - of the record cover and the titles of the songs, which you could then insert into your cassette case. It was really handmade.
ART iT: That brings me back to your untitled Elvis film. I had never heard Elvis’s version of “Unchained Melody” until I saw the
film, with Elvis seated at a grand piano on stage before an adoring crowd, sweating profusely and singing into a microphone held
by an assistant. There’s a maudlin element to the scenario, but seeing it in your work it gave me this idea that even a Pop song can
become an event, and even a commonplace image can communicate a specific situation.
WS: I believe that visual art can chew over everything again and find new contexts for it. Art is an experimental field for the other
disciplines like music and film. Divisions between Classical and Pop are totally obsolete. When you find the proper context, something
can take on meaning.
It’s similar to one of the paintings on display at Rat Hole Gallery with the woman’s legs sticking out from behind a bush. The image is
of a sculpture I saw recently, a fake, plaster sculpture at a garden at this place where I go for holidays. I saw it hidden in the bush and
it intrigued me. In a way it’s a trivial, stupid image but it can take on meaning if you look beyond that first glance.
ART iT: I guess part of it is also coming to terms with the redundancy of images, and the idea that we’re more conscious now than
ever before of how difficult it is to make an actually new image. The same applies to music too. There are only miniscule variations
between all these different songs, or between the Righteous Brothers’ version of “Unchained Melody” and Elvis’s version.
WS: Yes, it’s like walking along the edge of a cliff. You have to find your own way. If you stay away from the edge then you’ll be safe
but you’ll be among the crowd, no different from anyone else. If you go too far over the edge you can fall down.
The mainstream is overflowing to such an extent that the edge is really just a tiny sliver of space. When you are right on the edge, it’s
dangerous and challenging, but that is where the most crucial and significant things happen. I think there is a certain perversity in it.
ART iT: I had this dream the other night that I was on board a crashing airplane, and for some reason it seems like a good metaphor
for considering the velocity behind art, what gives a painting or film its presence.
In my dream as the gravitational pull kept getting stronger and stronger I was very calm and, realizing I only had 30 seconds or so to
do something, began thinking about the members of my family and saying to each one “I love you.” Of course in the airplane as I say
“I love you,” they’re not going to hear it, but it was important for me to speak it at that instant.
So in a sense at the right velocity something that is banal or pointless can become almost heroic.
WS: I know what you mean. It’s like with a sunset, it’s beautiful, yet in certain images it’s just kitsch.
By the way I have had many dreams about plane crashes, not as a passenger but as a witness. These dreams always took place in this
district where I lived in my youth. I know it’s quite terrible but it was very fascinating to see those dreams, very important for me. I
have painted airplanes many times as a metaphor, I guess, for the achievements of humanity. But as you say about saying “I love you,”
it depends on the circumstances.
That’s how to approach the edge and to find your own way along it. When you say, “I love you,” it can sound banal but on the other
hand it can also sound dramatic, and then be true, just as with a sunset.
Cover Image: Untitled (2007), oil on canvas, 160 x 200 cm. Courtesy Naomi Milgrom Collection, Australia, and Sadie Coles HQ, London.
Based in Kraków, Wilhelm Sasnal is represented by Sadie Coles HQ, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Hauser & Wirth and Anton Kern galleries. He has had solo exhibitions
at international institutions including the Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw), the Swiss Institute (New York), Douglas Hyde Gallery (Dublin), Vanabbe Museum
(Eindhoven) and M HKA (Antwerp). In 2006 he was awarded the Vincent Van Gogh Biennial Award for Contemporary Art in Europe.
Wilhelm Sasnal: Essay
Wilhelm Sasnal: Overturning the Everyday
By Akiko Kasuya
Untitled (The Concert) (2009), oil on canvas, 70 x 55 cm.
Wilhelm Sasnal was born in 1972 in Tarnów, a small city just outside Poland’s former capital, Kraków. After studying architecture
at Kraków University of Technology, he transferred to the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, from which he graduated in 1999. During
his years as a student from 1995 to 2001, Sasnal participated in the artist group Grupa Ładnie. Working together with peers including
Rafał Bujnowski (1974-) and Marcin Maciejowski (1974-), he focused on making paintings and drawings that explored how to transgress the boundaries between art and everyday life.
From early on, Sasnal chose familiar objects for his motifs, and he incorporated into his pictures the casualness and familiarity of the
everyday. His simplification of form and use of bright colors can be associated with Neo-Pop Art; however, the social and political
approach in his work can be traced to influences from the Łódź Kaliska group, famous for their radical and anarchist, yet humorous
artistic activities under Poland’s former Communist regime. Sasnal’s focus on the ordinary and everyday also underscored the intimacy of his relationships with close friends. Even in their group activities, the Ładnie members were more concerned with their personal
relationships than defining an artistic movement. The motifs they expressed, and the group name itself, meaning “beauty,” hinted at an
agenda fraught with a certain degree of irony. Even after the group disbanded, its members have each maintained this basic approach
in their individual practices.
Sasnal first gained international recognition as a painter around 2000, but in recent years his films have also attracted increasing attention. As Sasnal says himself, until 2004 he primarily exhibited only paintings and his films remained largely unseen (1). A key transition point occurred in 2006 when Sasnal was nominated for the Vincent van Gogh Biennial Award for Contemporary Art in Europe.
For the exhibition of the nominees at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Sasnal unexpectedly decided to show only his films. This
adventurous move overturned preconceptions about Sasnal that had begun to take root and also signaled an important breakthrough in
the artist’s career, as he went on to win the award. It also coincided with a period when recent developments in technology had led to
a dramatic reduction in the size of video equipment and allowed functionally superior equipment to be obtained at relatively low cost,
thereby creating an unparalleled influx of video works within the contemporary art world. However, rather than using video, Sasnal
has consistently used 8mm and 16mm film cameras (which can be seen as a parallel to his use of the traditional paintbrush and canvas
for his paintings) to produce sophisticated films that reflect the influence of music videos and integrate a psychedelic sensibility in
depicting subjects such as the landscape and his family.
In the summer of 2007, as I was preparing for the “Still/Motion: Liquid Crystal Painting” exhibition that focused on the relationship
between painting and film/video (2), I had the opportunity to research works from the “1, 2, 3 Avant-Gardes: Archives, Film, Art,
Experimentation” exhibition held at Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. Not only were Sasnal’s films deeply
affecting in particular, but they also changed the way I look at his paintings. Sasnal’s paintings and films resonate in harmony with
each other. For instance, the “painterly quality” of his films can be seen in his attention to texture and in his camerawork. The work
that was being shown in Warsaw was Untitled (2000-06), which depicted vaguely silhouetted human figures moving slowly in time to
pop music. I was moved by the work’s sense of ephemerality, its combination of poignancy with visual lushness, and could not stop
watching.
Installation view of Marfa (2005), 16mm film, sound, 25 min.
Similarly, Sasnal’s installation of the three films Marfa (2006), Love Songs (2005) and Centre (2004) alongside a group of six paintings in his current exhibition at Tokyo’s Rat Hole Gallery, “16mm films,” is filled with tension, realizing a kind of alien world.
Although his paintings were included in the exhibition “Essential Painting” at Osaka’s National Museum of Art in 2006, this is his first
solo exhibition in Japan, and the first opportunity for audiences here to see his films and paintings together.
It should be noted that there are several historically significant examples of collaborations between music and film/video in Polish
avant-garde film, such as Oko i ucho (The Eye and the Ear, 1945) - a brilliant combination of Karol Symanowski’s (1882-1937) music
and the Surrealistic animation of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson (1910-88/1907-88). Alternatively, one can think of the various
experiments by the Neo Avant-garde artists of the 1970s who used film to record the occurrences of daily life through the lens of a
camera. In particular, one might recall the work of Józef Robakowski (1939-), who investigated themes related to private and everyday
life and created several radical and humorous works that rebelled against the strict censorship of Communist rule at the time (3), and
the pioneering artistic experiments of Natalia LL (1937-), known for making conceptual works in the 1970s.
As for Sasnal, while carrying forward the lineage of Polish Avant-garde and Neo Avant-garde art, he was also influenced (most likely
through his education at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts) by late 20th-century painters from Kraków such as Maria Jarema (190858) and Jerzy Nowosielski (1923-). Regarding the responsibility of addressing the tradition of painting, Sasnal’s view of his role as
a painter is complex and ambiguous (4), but the “power to overturn” brought about by Sasnal’s sincere artistic activities is extremely
significant in this complicated era when the existential meaning of art is continually in question. Moreover, both Sasnal’s paintings and
film works, directly tied to the artist’s personal daily life, contain elements of Post-structuralism and references to Structuralism and
Modernism, which are interlaced to deconstruct Minimalism and serve the role of placing the imagined object once more in the realm
of reality. As a result, Sasnal’s work allows us to continually reinvent the relationship between ourselves and the everyday.
1, 4. Wilhelm Sasnal: “Lata Walki,” Zacheta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, Warszawa, 2007/Galeria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Trento, 2008
2. “Still/Motion: Liquid Crystal Painting,” Mie Prefectural Art Museum/The National Museum of Art, Osaka/Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2008
3. In Communist-ruled countries, only art based on Socialist realism could be officially exhibited. Poland was considered a relatively moderate regime compared
to other Eastern Bloc states, but artworks that pertained to political contexts or showed any sign of expressing criticism of the Soviet Union were strictly censored,
forbidden to be showed publicly and sometimes even confiscated or destroyed. For this reason, artists used sophisticated metaphors and analogies, and sometimes
realist expressions associated with daily life, to demonstrate creativity in their artistic activities. They often exhibited in private apartments or basements so that only
sympathetic individuals could see the work, and exhibition documentation was rarely made lest there remain any evidence of subversive activities that could be turned
over to authorities. In order to reconstruct and verify facts from the time period, memories from the people involved, fragments of film, low quality document copies
and handwritten notes that were secretly archived are currently being investigated.