"This is actually a series about death," declares Wojtek Wilczyk when asked about the subject of his latest series Life after life. If the photos of part or all of the bodies of cars turned into roadside advertisements, flowerbeds and decorations at the end of their life encourage us to contemplate the transience and transience of existence, they do so in an emotionally neutral way.
Wilczyk's documentation of the disintegration of material reality resembles much more a medical atlas depicting variations and successive stages of disease development, than the media's characteristic pursuit of a sensational and spectacular, and thus unique, death. What also brings Wilczyk's project closer to the atlas is the economy of formal means: a simple, square frame, central composition, zero staging, manipulation. The withdrawal of the artistic subject and the surrender of the field of the photographed reality distinguish the Life after life among the many pathetic attempts to visualize death. Paradoxically, the documentary sublimity is also helped by the use of color, an obvious novelty compared to Wilczyk's previous photographic series (From the Window, Black and White Silesia or Postindustrial). Eye-catching, often aggressive and seductive - as in a roadside advertisement - color, according to the premonitions of the masters of art photography, strips the photographed reality of its artistic, essentially sentimental aura.
It has become almost a common habit among critics writing about photography and death to quote Roland Barthes. To make the tradition a reality, I propose to refresh, although in a slightly different context, coming from half a century ago Mythologies by the same author. In a scintillating essay, eRBe wrote about - and what a thing - Citroen's latest model (specifically, the famous "deesce" or "goddess"): "I think that the automobile today is a sufficiently accurate equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I want to say - a great creation of the age created in the passionate imagination of unknown artists, carried out in dreams, if not in the open, by a whole nation that appropriates under its guise a completely magical object." In Barthes' text - as in Erwin Panofsky's famous and by no means ironic comparison of a Rolls-Royce bonnet with the portico of a Greek temple, or the Italian Futurists' adoration of the automobile - the somewhat forgotten admiration for industrial beauty today draws attention. The magical power of industrial forms also organized the life of communities in Poland, where instead of deeski or rollsa The unmatched object of desire for the masses were the Maluchy, produced under license, the pinnacle of domestic motorization, the FSO Polonez, or Trabants imported from East Germany. All that's left of the former dreams is a slightly nostalgic remnant neatly integrated into the contemporary landscape of consumer society (it's no coincidence that most wrecks serve as commercial advertisements). In this context, it is clear that Wilczyk's photographs (not only of automobiles, but also, for example, "The Wreck of the World. Postindustriale) illustrate the decline of modernity unabashedly promising us a better tomorrow that will be achieved through technological progress. Looking through the prism of the photographed remnants of Mermaids, Small and Large Fiats, Zaporozhets, or other Humpbacks, we are more cautious in comparing the automobile with a Gothic cathedral.
In Wilczyk's works, including photographs depicting car wrecks, it is not difficult to discern something of the melancholy atmosphere of the ruins so readily contemplated by the Romantics. How treacherous such an interpretative path can turn out to be is shown in a text by Marek Janczyk, a critic writing for the newly established Polish-German magazine Bluehn. The peculiar atmosphere of the pictures described allowed the critic to qualify Wojciech Wilczyk (along with Ireneusz Zjeżdżałka and Krzysztof Zieliński, among others) as a "new romantic". In the text titled. Modern Romantics Janczyk breakneckly proves the post-romantic paradigm-based continuity of contemporary Polish photography from Andrzej Różycki to Wojciech Wilczyk to Marek Gardulski. Documentary of the time seemingly objective and cool, in fact involved and emotional - Janczyk writes about Wilczyk's photographs.Recalling the text from the Bluehn will allow us to better grasp the specifics of Wilczyk's work and the entire trend of contemporary photography that has formed around him. Author Black and White Silesia undoubtedly belongs to that group of artists who in recent years have consciously positioned themselves in opposition to art photography (photography), whose long tradition in Poland has its sources precisely in the romantic understanding of the role of the artist and art. The personal war that Wilczyk, an artist, critic and poet, has waged on fine art, staged, post-pictorialist photography, in other words, any that denies the nature of the medium, which is the objective registration of reality, is well known in the community (it would be a separate matter to compare the poetic practice of Wilczyk, author of the "Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V" series, with his stance as a photographer). So Wilczyk, Zjeżdżałka, Zieliński, Dubiel, Milach and others are the "new documentarians," not the "new romantics." Decisively rejecting the quasi-romantic blindness that allows us to see and appreciate the artist's passionate commitment where we have the coldness of rational analysis, we clearly see a new technical and objective documentary chapter in Polish contemporary art, of which Wilczyk is one of the founders.
Of course, car wrecks stimulate nostalgic, and further melancholy thinking (Janczyk writes about it photographs [Wilczyk]. they seem to express the nagging loneliness of buildings and machines abandoned by people, always absent from these images. And again there is an awareness of inevitable transience, the present is intertwined with history literalism with metaphor). Resisting the nostalgia embracing not only the formerly happy users of two-stroke East German vehicles, it is worth trying to see in Wilczyk's latest project something more than an elaborate metaphor for the decline of modern technical civilization. Life after life as much as about death, speaks of the resurrection of things (the biblical context of the truly intriguing title of the series of simple, unpretentious photographs is a separate issue requiring consideration). Wilczyk's conscientiously paged atlas testifies to the perceptiveness of the author of the photographs, but also, or perhaps above all, it attests to the presence of people, the grassroots creativity of nameless creators who, from industrially manufactured bolts, were able to create works of stunning surreal absurdity, because how else than in artistic terms can one describe the colorful forms of bent sheet metal levitating a few meters above the ground. Inscribed in the landscape, the unbeautiful objects burst and revolutionize capitalist everyday life. It is enough to see to what extent these strange advertising carriers deviate from the standards of global agencies preparing corporate marketing strategies to see their subversive potential. Car fetishes, which former owners find it hard to part with, are transformed into roadside monuments, poetic bricolages, poor relatives of stylized advertisements of the automotive business, utterly magical objects of which Barthes wrote, but already serving capitalist society as much as the creative ambitions of individuals.
Wojtek Wilczyk (1961), photographer, poet and art critic. Author of essays and critical texts on art.
The article appeared in issue 19 of "Kwartalnik Fotografia" in 2005