Anna Luczak

READING IS A RAPID GUESSING.

The English expression “to take French leave” means “to slip away unnoticed”.
Things slip away, people and places, change, rapidly and unexpectedly, or slowly, little by little. Quiet, with no drama, or from one day to another. With this we shall all agree and somehow accept.
Over the course of my life America disappeared, the tram line number 9, 1/4th of the Antarctic ice and Beverly Hills 90210. When converted to the lousy zloty, a dollar was worth five hundred lumps of butter. Or thereabouts. Now, for one dollar, you could probably get one lump of butter, but, no one buys butter for dollars any more, no one dreams about dollars. Things change. The core of things, the core of ideas. This is happening all the time, every day. Entropy is a measure of the natural decay in the social system, which states that the whole world is going to pot and every day is worse than the other. I am not sure about that. Thats not my point. In my practice I have decided not to protest against this somewhat biological and organic process, but, at least mark, and “frame the absence” of things lost or passed as well as to try to give the second life to the disappearing itself. This is somewhat comforting process connected to memory. It also allows me to question and notice certain patterns and systems that I am finding myself in, spot thinking traps and habits that become a second nature. There is an interesting tension, a blur between things, ideas and words which i have been trying to visualize through my works.




In Haarlem, in the Groote Keerk, there is a very old organ, it was used by Mozart in 1766 when he was passing by Netherlands, age 10, touring through Europe, together with his father and younger sister. He was passing by accidentally and got sick, therefore, had to stop a little bit longer. Already, a brilliant child, was celebrated, and his fame was rising. Unexpectedly expanded visit was a chance for a fruitful performance, exactly in the Groote Kerek. The organ, still remains, where it was in 1766.

Madder Lake is a plant, which roots are one of the oldest ways to achieve the red pigment, known already in ancient Egypt, used for Tutankhamen's tomb. In ancient Greece and Roman art it was diluted with gypsum, to produce pink hue.Madder Lake was one of Vermeer's favorite colors, and many of ladies, showing up on his paintings have their clothes covered with its deep purple tones. In the seventeenth century it became the color of the British army's red coat, where it spread, as colonial power expanded to all directions of the world. Symbolizing the blood of solders, long before it ended up on the Coca Cola logo, together with McDonalds.

The golden ratio is the way image was trusted to be a wonderfully perfect and achieving godly harmony and beauty. Some of the greatest mathematical minds of all ages, from Pythagoras and Euclid in Ancient Greece, through the medieval Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa and the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, to present-day scientific figures such as Oxford physicist Roger Penrose, have spent endless hours contemplating this simple ratio and its properties. But the fascination with the Golden Ratio is not confined just to mathematicians. Biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, psychologists, and even mystics have pondered and debated the basis of its ubiquity and appeal. In fact, it is probably fair to say that the Golden Ratio has inspired thinkers of all disciplines like no other number in the history of mathematics.

Objects and memories intertwine, what is part of the specificity of the material and what is just an imaginative/associative result of what can be “read”? The activity of reading calls for quick decision-making, because all words have many meanings, including word “to read”. A reference to the subjective experience and memory of the “material” in general. Collective versus individual memory.
My graduation project is a search within the various media. Thinking about the trace within the craft, thinking about the disappearance and resistance of forms that go and come back in different incarnations.

I would like to divide my thesis in two parts.

The first part will consist of 4 transcribed dialogues on following subjects:

the linguistic/conversation,
the objective/specific,
the ephemeral/the metaphysical/the daily,
the object/material,

disappearing/memory

The first subject is system that organizes all the others, as well as a way to identify oneself.
The second subject is a goal and a need, in order to make one feel that the direction is right, but, seems also a thing that exist just in a language, the impossible goal.
Perfect measurement. It is a hope of scientific and an impossible need. It is an arrangement between the group of people. Something to aim for, but out of reach. Makes me think of the film The Wicker Man, which illustrates this problem, how a set of rules and arrangements works only conditionally.
The third subject functions between something and nothing, which positions it again, only in language.
The fourth is also where all the others can materialize themselves.
I would like to arrange conversations with translator, scientist, artist and craftsman. With all of them, the repeating subject will be the disappearing and memory.

Those are the subjects that I see circulating around my practice. Each of these subjects I would like to look close. Each of those catchwords represent the way I am thinking while producing works.
Thinking through and writing about those subjects is helpful for me to understand the thinking process I am going through while working.
Within the thesis each of these subjects can be the pretext for a conversation with people who I find relevant to the topics.
The transcription of the conversation is a motif that I have been working with for a few years.
I like the way it is possible through the transcription to find the pace of the conversation, the nuances that are happening between people talking, the unexpectedness of the path of thoughts.
The immateriality of thoughts that become material by writing them down.

Second part of my thesis will be dedicated to recent progress in the developing project.
I am going to be experimenting with materials thinking about their history and trying to find ways to combine it with visual language in non linear, abstract and free way.







RELATION TO PREVIOUS PRACTICE

In my few past projects I was busy with “framing the absence”.
There was nothing to see, the materiality of idea seemed to be disappointing, so my practice was circulating around ephemeral, silent and invisible. My medium was language, naming, identifying, comparing. The language with its ability to classify and identify was a key to most of my projects. They were mostly site-specific events, tiny interventions that would play with observed reality.Important was the relation between the work and the title, that would often build the tension and be the key point, “make” the work.
Some of my earlier projects were also circulating around the subject of ephemerality and the problem of the documentation, so, what is the difference between the actual and the remembered? What is that relation and which of those two is more important?

Looking for a square is a video loop, person, filmed from the back is walking through the city. After a while it is possible to notice that the square is "found" in the walking. It is not there, but its there at the same time, and we could find any other figure if we wanted to. We could find any figure or any other thing anywhere. I was thinking of mathematics, which is both discovered and invented, and how we are ruling it and how it is ruling us. It is there in every thing, and we define its being. I decide to walk in this square, the square is there if I want to.

The "or=or" installation consisted of: video loop of a man repetitively kicking tiny stone while walking on the pavement. Camera is hold by the one who performs this action, filmed free hand. Three framed A4 prints of a black circle on white background, the circle is loosing its sharpness gradually on each of the prints. The matte board of each print is cut slightly off the middle, slightly faulty. Video loop of a man repetitively kicking brick while walking on the pavement.The camera is held by the one who performs this action, filmed again, free hand. The brick leaves marks on the pavement, while being kicked. Wooden, white, cubical forms, painted white, with each, a text on them. Texts as such: kick it(stone), kick it(brick), simplified three-dimensional map, showing clearly how to get somewhere, simplified three-dimensional map, showing clearly how to get somewhere else, three points of destination, or=or, 1956. 2 black vertical and horizontal forms, about 150 cm each. Black and white photograph of a child 10x7cm. A close up of a child's face, painted on canvas 15x15 cm with black oil paint. This installation was testing the ability to “read things”, the objects gathered in the space, with and without the guidance of the language, seen as the system in which we are placed, as well as testing language itself and its ability to describe.

Thinking about words and their relation to writing and “making world”, made me think of the system under which words themselves are ruled. All the songs ever written, rearranged, was a sound installation of an opera singer singing all letters in alphabetical order. The sound was installed in the cellar of the gallery, with the speakers directed towards the vents, to get the sound operate outside, while inside, the visitor triggers the movement detector by entering the space. This work consisted also of two lists of onomatopoeic words, one of them organized as in the encyclopedia, another, forming sort of haiku. The prints were about 15x10cm.These parts were separated, but, were to be considered one work.

Another sound installation I have made last year was the one for the gallery in Rotterdam, called Upominki (polish for “gifts”) I have installed the doorbell with the record of 7 grammatical cases of word “upominki” read slowly with voice expressing tiredness, irritation and disbelief that this activity can bring a successful effect, in other words, there is no hope to teach foreign to this language (most of) its visitors to pronounce the name of the gallery correctly. The doorbell is now a permanent element of that space. I have decided not to write any explanation of the work, the non native speaker probably wont know what it is, unless they ask. If the visitor asks, explanation will be delivered by the person who runes the gallery. Her understanding of this piece, is how it will be delivered for a non polish visitor.

My most recent project “Moving places” was different from ones mentioned above. It explores the materiality of the stone, the medium of sculpting, the craft, physicality and the labour. It was created for and integrated with the space where it was installed. The work was composed of few marble stones, arranged in the garden of stone carving workshop in Bavaria. Marble stones were placed on sheets of glass found around the wooden shelter where the work was installed. There were three main focus points of the installation: the marble stone polished as much as the tools allowed the placed on the glass plate on the ground, with a photograph of the tombstone of Lodovica by Bernini under the glass plate, the “raw”, unpolished stone, placed on another glass plate and the marble dust, produced by polishing the stone, exposed on the third glass plate supported by marble stone from one side.

In this work I was thinking about the ability of material to transmit its history by minimal intervention.
Thinking through the material (marble stone) about what it stands for, thinking about the “memory of the object”, what makes “the thing” to be what it is? 

I would like to further develop this method of work, as it seems more productive for me, try to look at the material and experiment with it.


PRACTICAL STEPS

I imagine 4 dialogues created around mentioned subjects, that in the end can be reflected in the graduation piece.
The graduation piece can as well be seen as a final product of the gathered thoughts and the thesis as feeding the work. The previous and newly created work can as well be the subject mentioned in each conversations I will have.

The way my work usually unfolds is connected to reading, watching, memorizing, thinking through and with things I am surrounded by.
The influence is not always seen directly, it is not that work is “about” mentioned subjects, its more that I am hoping to bring those ideas within my work, and thats why I would like to examine those.
I would like to find the way to combine my more “immaterial” and “linguistic” method of working, with this focussed on the material and form.



REFFERANCES


Disappearing. A User's Manual, Katarzyna Chmielewska, Mateusz Kwaterko,
Susan Sontag, The esthetics of Silence
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, Objectivity,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar
Maurice Halbwach, On Collective Memory

Key words: tautology,onomatopoeia,nothing,something,somewhere,nowhere,silence,repetition, ephemeral. Two opposites: things that are changing constantly (many) and things that always stay the same (few)

along those lines.

some things to read/some things to see