Until 23 July 2023, visitors coming to the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Kraków will be able to see an exhibition entitled ‘Bownik. Undercoat,’ which is a cross-section of the artist’s creative work dating ten years back. What is the titular undercoat? How do you peek at objects? Can boredom be inspiring? The artist himself answers these and other questions.
The exhibition is showcased at the Europe – Far East Gallery. At the entrance we are welcomed by a large-sized platform built up with walls, a structure resembling a tree house someone has torn down brutally and placed in the museum. One of the walls has wafers fixed on it and the other one has boards with holes intertwined with golden decorations. I’m looking for a description to find out what this wonder is: at the same time delightful, bewildering, and a bit annoying, because it obstructs our view of the photographs. I find the answers in the brochure accompanying the exhibition. It needs a thorough and time-consuming reading, but it’s worth it. The platform turns out to be an authentic place where Bownik worked during the pandemic. It is his micro-world where he created such works as ‘The Ceiling,’ ‘The Chamber,’ ‘Peepholes,’ and ‘Growth.’ In addition to the photographs mentioned above, on the ground floor we will be able to see photos of plants from the ‘Disassembly’ series and two photograph series: ‘Boys and Girls I Know’ and ‘E-Słodowy.’ The whole is completed by display cases with the artist’s sketches. It is worth taking the stairs to enter the top floor of the gallery so as not to miss the videos in which Bownik depicts his creative process. The top floor has been dominated by a series of scaled-up photographs of wafers and works addressing the topic of broadly understood spirituality, such as ‘The Urn’ or photographs from ‘The Reverse’ series.
Sara Dąbrowska: Why did you want to show the platform and other elements of the creative process?
Bownik: To me, an exhibition is not just about showcasing finished works. I never think of it that way. It is more about familiarising viewers with the things that are important to me in a given moment. I want the audience to get to know me, also as a human being. There is also another aspect of the things we are discussing – the educational aspect. As you know, photography is a widespread medium. Many people believe that it is easy to take a photo in a mechanical way and that it doesn’t require any particular artistry. The exhibition of sketches, the platform, and the whole background of my work brings the audience closer to this less obvious side of photography. A given photograph is often only the last step on the long way that includes the development of a concept, a plan, the creation of sculptures or paintings. These gestures from other fields of art create the final work. The transparency of the creative process is very significant to me, as it lets the audience see the full picture and understand the complexity of the process.
SD: As we are talking about the educational layer, let us stop for a while on the artist-audience communication. Are you a person who likes explaining his art, telling stories, and clarifying things?
B: I enjoy it and I want to do it. I like talking about my assumptions and listen to what others think about them, because it always works both ways. I feel that it is necessary to name some things, to explain the conceptual practice. Let’s take ‘The Reverse’ as an example. The work is based on a simple idea. It is a gesture of turning an item around or turning clothes to the wrong side out. But this symbolic gesture needs to be explained in terms of how to read such a performance. However, the latest works I was creating on the platform – ‘The Chamber’ or ‘The Ceiling’ – are characterised by a more impression-inclined approach. I departed from developing notions, meanings, and from sketching.
SD: Do you want your art to reach a wide group of recipients?
B: I’m aware that contemporary art is not perfect for explaining, it is not good in telling a story, and it is one of the reasons why it is not received well at the mass audience level. I would like anyone attending the exhibition to find a point of reference there. It does not need to be at a very deep level, but I’d like the core layer and the things that the viewers observe to be accessible.
SD: You’re active on social media. Your works were the background for a Vogue photo shoot. Does such presence in the so-called popular culture help you reach people?
B: I don’t make distinctions between art for museums and art for the Internet. Both these art distribution channels are crucial. Going back to what we have been discussing before, if there is a proper commentary to such a work of art, it is OK. I don’t want to be locked in a bubble and in a hermetic world. Sometimes there are activities I haven’t planned, just like in the case of Vogue. But it is interesting to me at a cultural level, and I like exploring this.
SD: Some of the works showcased at the exhibition in Manggha, mainly the ones from the ‘Disassembly’ series, can be classified as bioart – an art form which takes up the topic of ecology, the Anthropocene, man versus nature. As an artist, do you see it as a mission to raise environmental awareness?
B: We are experiencing a climate crisis. It is an indisputable fact. Bioart or bio-form themselves are comprehensive notions which do not always arise from a moral stance, but sometimes from a pure fascination with nature. To me, it is only about one thing when I think both about the photographs from the ‘Disassembly’ series of 2012 and the ‘Colours of Lost Time’ of 2019, which concerned extinct bird species. It was about noticing what humans are in relation to nature. Although nobody would use the term ‘Anthropocene’ back in 2012.
SD: Can you tell us a bit more about the two series?
B: The photographs of flowers, similarly to ‘The Reverse,’ are also about turning around. Turning around became a fact when humans, posing as curious scientists, began changing nature. You leave a trace and there is no turning back. The flowers are cut out, we have inscriptions and elements attached with a tape on them. The photos show this unwanted match between the artificial and the natural world, which humans have invented.
SD: ‘The Colours of Lost Time’ were different.
B: Yes, birds generate more dynamic circumstances. These photographs, colourful circles created from the moving pictures of extinct birds are the echo, the afterimages. There is only a memory and a story. The abstract elements emerge from the real-world ones. I resigned from the narrative and realism at the visual level.
SD: You created afterimages that are super attractive.
B: I communicate using attractiveness. It’s the outcome of my creative work. I don’t plan this, but I notice and accept it. Even with extreme, dramatic topics, my photos are visually attractive. They are nice-looking. It may often define people’s approach and it is very interesting. For example, someone hangs a work about the extinction of species on the wall, just because it is pretty. This demonstrates that we are all responsible for the things that we like.
SD: Yes. It is nice-looking and colourful.
B: In my opinion black is not enough to talk about death, so I choose colours, as black does not have such striking power. Colour becomes attractive. The same applies to flowers. It is a type of hypnotising with the use of grace. Ultimately, after sufficient input is provided, there is information about death, and we start looking at the things we know in a completely different way.
SD: It seems that the ‘Undercoat’ exhibition is about that. Let’s consider this word for a while. Did you suggest this title?
B: Magda Ziółkowska, the exhibition curator, came up with the title, as she is a dog fan. To me, undercoat is something physical, but outside the foreground. It is hidden but can come to the outside. It was always intriguing to me in photography. I did not wish to dig too deep, but instead notice the things that are right under the surface. It is interesting, because we are usually not aware of what’s just next to reality. You look at clothes, at Piłsudski, who is one-dimensional, a monument-figure, and a façade. It would not occur to you to look at him from a different perspective. And when you turn his uniform to the wrong side, it turns out that there is something completely different there, something human and physical.
SD: You become a voyeur at that moment, don’t you? Do you associate yourself with the figure of photographer – voyeur?
B: It is indispensable, and this is the phenomenon of photography. This is the subiect of ’Peepholes,’ a constructed place which conjures up the sense of being hidden, but able to look outside – though this relationship is reversed when we look at a photograph.
SD: Photographers usually peek at people, and what about you?
B: I peek at objects. I treat people in my photographs as figures expressing certain notions. It is visible in the ‘Boys and Girls I Know’ series, where, for instance, ‘The Conjurer’ depicts the experience of loss in youth. People are treated here on a par with objects.
There is also this type of intellectual peeking at objects in the semantic layer. I have been trying to capture it – some kind of meaning I was aware of before. Something that is not so obvious. For example, ‘The Screen’: an object belonging to the Manggha museum, which cannot be exhibited because of its condition – it is partly damaged. One part shows, underneath an accidentally ripped layer of painted silk, not just its structural elements, but the fact that the screen has been filled with sheets of paper which have been written on.
Kengo Kuma. Experimenting with Materials. What should ideal architecture be like?
Kengo Kuma (born in 1954) is one of the most recognizable architects of Japanese origin. The artist intensely draws from the local tradition, but despite this fact, he has never limited himself to a specific geographical area. His works can be found practically everywhere around the globe, for example in the cities such as Tokyo, Sydney, Milan and many more.
As he often says, he strives to ‘reclaim the material.’ This is why he gives up on the omnipresent, cold concrete and replaces it with wood, which used to be utilized as a building material so much earlier than the times historians managed to document.
SD: It is not the only element of the Manggha collection you have used this way.
B: There is also Suiseki: a stone reflecting the natural landscape, in which one can supposedly see and feel the world. However, I photographed it from above it is anarchy, but I set the lighting in such a way so that the shadow shows the landscape line, not the stone itself. It is a suggestion to look at things using an extended perception.
SD: Can you tell us about the photograph series we can view at the Europe – Far East Gallery.
B: These are works which draw inspiration from reproductions in the technical layer which I use in the artistic dimension. They are photographed wafers with scribbles. It is a meeting place of the human world (scribbles) and an inhuman world (matrix as a form of automation). The photographs are significantly scaled up. They are the size of sacred paintings. This change of scale can bring to the surface the things that are usually hidden, the anatomic irregularities of the figures of saints, anti-aestheticism. I wanted to create a sense of illusion. A lot of people think that they’re real and want to touch them.
SD: The scribbling might be associated with boredom.
B: I associate boredom with wafers because I’m bored by the image of family we can see on the wafers. This super mythology, this unreality. Because it bores me, the figure of boredom exposes this social mythology and its structure. A question may be posed if it is important.
SD: Has anyone told you that it’s profanation?
B: No. These wafers were not consecrated. The trick is that I don’t add much to the images – only the wafers are schematic, simplified, and deformed. The ambiguity also comes from the fact that we have seen these images so many times that we no longer see them for what they are, or we suddenly discover that they are unintentionally comical.
SD: It is possible to observe boredom in your creative work, but to me, the main ideas I associate with your art are exposure and curiosity. Which one has a greater share?
B: They are synonymous in my practice. Curiosity is a positive word, but when I disassemble flowers for the sake of curiosity, and assemble them again, it has an exposing nature and it is a sign of boredom.
