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 a video loop “Looking for a square” 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.
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.
In my graduation project i would like to continue my practice on “framing the absence” and keeping this search within various media.
My most recent project “Moving Places” explores the materiality of the stone. 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, 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 yet another marble stone from one side.
In this work I was thinking about the ability of the material to transmit its history by minimal interventions. Thinking through the material (marble stone) about what it stands for, questioning the “memory of the object”.
I would like to further develop this method of working, trying to look at the material and experimenting through it. Thinking about the trace within the craft, the disappearance and resistance of forms that go and come back in different incarnations. 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.
My work is going to develop around following subjects:
First example of tracing the material:
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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 thumb. In ancient Greece and Roman art it was diluted with gypsum, to produce pink hue. Madder Lake was one of Vermeer's favorite color, andmany 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 got spread, together with expanded colonial power to all directions of the world. Symbolizing the blood of solders, long before it ended up on the can of Coca-Cola and pack of McDonalds fries.
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second example of tracing the material:
In Haarlem, in the Groote Keerk, there is a very old organ, it was used by Mozart in 1766 when he was passing by the 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.
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Final example of tracing the material:
The Golden Ratio is the way image was trusted to be wonderfully perfect and achieving godly harmony and beauty. Some of the greatest mathematical minds of all ages, have spent endless hours over this measurement and its properties. It is incredible to realize that our own, simple and daily A4 paper format is based on this old system, which served to build pyramids of Giza. Pierre Bismouth is following the right hand of his favorite film stars. For me, following the usage of the golden ratio provides similar pleasure.
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With my graduation project i would like to develop a free, non-linear, abstract visual language and continue to work with the ways the story of an object or an idea can be conveyed.
I will depart from those stories and play around the materiality of the subject.
For the writing part however i will continue developing subjects i have abstracted form works produced last year.
I would like to divide my thesis in two parts. First part will be describing the development of my most recent project, “Reading is a rapid guessing”, and the second part will consist of 4 transcribed dialogues on following subjects:
the linguistic/conversation, as a system that organizes all the others the objective/specific.The objectivity, as a set of rules and arrangements that works only conditionally, because specificity applies to objects and subjects. the ephemeral/the metaphysical/the daily, the ephemeral that happens daily, and calls for the metaphysical between something and nothing. All these three subjects, linguistic/conversation, objective/specific, and ephemeral/metaphysical/daily materialize in the object/material, the last subject of my thesis.
I will arrange conversations with translator, judge, artist and craftsman. With all of them i will discuss disappearance and memory. The transcription of the conversation is a register that has been present in my work for some time. 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. While the first part can be seen as a dialogue with myself, or with a possible reader, i haven't decided yet whom to address, in the second part i will invite external opinions, “experts”. I see them as performing those topics in their professional practices. Those four subjects will be conceptual tools to analyze the disappearing and memory.
The three examples of tracing the material tell how i am going to approach the subjects from the thesis within my practice.
REFFERANCES
Disappearing, The users manual, Mateusz Kwaterko, Katarzyna Chmielewska, Kuba Szreder
Susan Sontag, The esthetics of Silence
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
Honza Zamojski, Rhymes like dimes
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.
