On Lines and Patterns
Sketches of a lost childhood and fading memories
Poland, Summer in the countryside, tea and cake, “Say ‘Thank you,’ please,” mother, grandmother, friends, “Burda” magazines, cuttings, patterns, designs, quillings, pleats, cuffs, collars, boot cuts, crew necks, muttoned sleeves mere dreams in the harsh day-to-day reality of Socialism. Just like any young girl in the early 80’s, Marzena also longed for the cute, colourful dresses found mostly in magazines imported by her mother from the neighbouring and at the time comparatively rich German Democratic Republic.
On such contemplative late afternoons, she turned her wistful gaze to these imaginary windows on the world, its luxury and fashion. The Polish textile industry itself did not have much to offer, in any case nothing for the Polish market. Women, then, rebelled against the grayness and insufficiencies of daily life, armed only with their imagination and their dreams.
They are memories from her childhood fabric patterns and designs which Marzena Nowak transfers to oversized canvas as intricate, abstract linear networks. By tightening and stretching simple lines, the resultant intermingling and weaving compositions form new graphic configurations somewhere between geometry and chaos, boundless threading combinations compressing at once beneath trailing eyes into the figurative, before dissolving into the unrecognizable and incomprehensible.
The artistic process in Marzena Nowak’s work is a permanent “search for lines”, an attempt to realize forms only to immediately discard them again, to connect them as a whole before at once breaking them up into individual fragments. In her meshwork she follows traces of memories of past moments lingering between inner association and cold distance. Under the comfortable screen of security and closeness lurks the familiar ghost of tedium and adolescent protest defeating itself in successive destruction of order. With the help of tracing paper, Marzena Nowak copies fragments of an everyday language into the sphere of artistic creativity. The basis for her works are clothing patterns from fashion magazines and are the vernacular code of “Burda” readers. Their visual language is the language of tailors and mothers.
What from a distance seems to resemble abstract linear manifestations akin to those of the revolutionary Russian constructivists, upon closer inspection forms mappings and topographies somewhere between geographic markers and a search for domestic origins. Marzena Nowak executes the close-ups of simple patterns with almost pedantic meticulousness. In doing so, Marzena Nowak’s works pull our gaze into a basketwork of ever-fresher linear connection and disconnection in a “web of signs” to use the words of Recoeur; and in time and again omitting or altering the linguistic and linear combination necessary for understanding fashion patterns, she abandons the level of meaning and clarity. Her artistic efforts, then, lead her “into Chaos” which is, according to Gombrowicz, “the origin of Order”[1].
An order at whose core lies visual/linguistic codes. The language thereby serves to relay our existence as a “Sein-in-der-Welt” (worldly presence), it is the “medium” or “the means by and through which the subject places and displays him- or herself in the world,” writes Ricouer[2]. Marzena Nowak uses the language of her childhood; her memories are employed as a means of communication while at the same time being rendered invalid. The lines and patterns have long become incoherent and incomprehensible even to her. This search for and destruction of form reveals a great deal of melancholy concerning the appalling disjointedness in the world, and loneliness as unbearable yet interminable certainty of being. In her work, life thus becomes intersection and pattern becomes abstract code relating to “insatiable desire” in the form of patterns on canvas. Me, myself and reality.
If Wittgenstein sees the limitations of the world in the limitations of language[3], then Marzena Nowak leaves the limitations of her language and memories long behind and loses her youth and its dreams.
According to Gombrowicz, one of the basic human traits is the permanent inclination toward “forming himself”: He accustoms himself to the conventions of conformation in order to gain social acceptance, he puts on masks, he accepts the moral and aesthetic demands of the “outside” world. It is the world which creates “order” and which defines life and human action. It is the day-to-day world, the world of repetition, of the mundane, of customs and rituals; it is the world of habits which discourage the unexpected and the new, a world which Marzena Nowak addresses and revolts, which deforms and alters the “outside world” and its order through its sensibilities, it emotions, fixations and obsessions. It is an everlasting overlapping of both worlds which finds its expression in the dialectics between the inception and abolishment of form. It is the material from which Marzena Nowak creates her artistic intermediate worlds: Hybrids, poetic entities between chaos and order, interior and exterior, recollection and oblivion, micro-and macrocosms. What you see is not what you see, since you can only see what you can remember. And only then, when you can no longer remember, can you see what is there and what you did not see before. When you can no longer see, then the sense of touch remains, and you touch what you have seen.
Marzena Nowak’s scepticism toward the world and its conventions corresponds to her distrust vis-à-vis the physical possibilities of worldly experience through sight. The video entitled “Eye” reconstructs one of the artist’s childhood dreams in which an old lady attempts to remove a small girl’s ocular lens using a crochet hook. The eye is rendered useless as the central organ of worldly perception. In modifying Buńuel’s trademark scene, Marzena Nowak contradicts the auratization of sight. Still, the eye is not destroyed, but peeled. An eye is an eye is an eye; nothing more, nothing less.
Marzena Nowak thus styles existential dimensions in transitory zones between banality, absurdity, memory and ecstasy.
Katarzyna Uszynska
[1] Gombrowicz, Witold: Dziennik 1961-1966, Dziela, t. IX, WL, Krakow 1989, 141
[2] Ricoeur, Paul: Le confit des interpretetations. Paris 1969, 108
[3] Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Frankfurt am Main 1960, 64: 5, 6.