Fixed on a line, the eye follows its tracks; the line breaks and vanishes amidst others … the eye rests on another, ragged and fading away. An extension to the eye, the camera, wanders over the surface of intersecting strokes adding up to barely perceptible contours. The above gives the gist of Marzena Nowak’s latest video completed in conjunction with her painting series called Cutous.
Perception of the spatially of the world is an intellectual property, an individual trait. The observation that a thing is flat or extends inwards has a subjective flavour, the extent of which is difficult to assess. The sense of spatial existence cannot be gauged in a laboratory using research tools. These can only help us ascertain some facts but will never give the definitive answer to the question, why to some reality manifests itself as more “inward” while to other as more “on the surface”.
From the Renaissance, painting was a representation of reality on a flat canvas surface. Perspective served as a rational tool, the use of which guaranteed a definitive effect of an illusion of reality, both reality cognizable by scientific methods and notional reality, conjured up by the power of human imagination. In point of fact, all types of space were similar to each other, each with a well defined centre, or a dominant point occupied by a human being, a male human being to be precise. He, the viewer and creator in one, was the one to establish relations between objects, between the significant and the insignificant. This is reflected in the academy hierarchy of art genres.
Modernism put an end to the perfect rendering of reality while cleansing painting of illusionism, the avant-garde lesson has not ruled out imitation, or duplication of reality on canvas, merely altering its role: a painting is no longer a window opening to the world, but an object which may unveil real beings though it exists disconnected from them; they are an excuse, not the goal. Concentrating on form, the avant-garde artist apparently failed to see that the place he used to occupy in the centre of the world had ceased to exist even though he still continued to consider himself “creator”. In postmodernism reality values have become scattered; there is no dominant style, there are no patterns for reproduction and no theories instrumental in creation.
The more the world shrinks thanks to all sorts of communication techniques, the more the space accessible to human cognition expands, stretching inwards and sideways, and the more resistant it becomes to general understanding. Things close to us are just as difficult to investigate and understand as what is called the starry sky. A hierarchy of subjects no longer exists in art: everything can be important, and whether a subject becomes a matter of public interest is up to the artist’s decision.
Lucy Lippard’s theory that women’s art is characterized by definitive style forms, such a predilection for detail, concentric forms, streamlining shapes, repetition of elements, and flat images, has not stood the to the test of time, and today most researchers of both sexes insist that differences between mal and female art should not be sought in formal issues but in an intricate complex of artistic considerations resulting from the different position of women in society. Specific attitudes, in that artistic ones, are determined by psychosymbolic considerations.
The socialization of girls proceed otherwise than boys, even if on the surface they are treated impartially. Mental adolescence is genderdetermined even if we perceive the process as the effect of cultural modes of behaviour. “I was surrounded by sewing patterns in childhood”, Marzena Nowak said while explaining the origin of her painting. “Only my mother could find the right shape. To me, they were constellations, fingerprints, maps, the universe…”. This does not mean; however, that in her Cutouts tha artist retreats to the world of childhood dreams; on the contrary, she shows us these dreams with an air of evident detachment, deliberately constructing space governed by the peculiar logic of a dressmaker’s pattern. In the past, it was a space of dreams for her, now it has become that of identification, of sealing childhood memories. That pattern images came ahead of image patterns borders on conceptual tautology. It is not shown directly, this is no longer the done thing, but we easily become aware of it observing yet again that the whole, art inclusive, world as built on tautology.
Now the artist has only just embarked on independent work after her graduation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, it is difficult to assess the significance of her’ focus on the surface (besides he Cutouts also evident in the earlier painting series entitled Bedding) and explorations of the surface (as in her Water video featuring a hand touching the surface of water, and in the film Lashes, featuring finger turned eyes). This may be interpreted as an unconscious expression of feminine experience, in which the cultural limitations of women are externalized in a way causing no rebellion and allowing phenomena to be examined at a slow pace – through touch rather than sight. The Renaissance male artist’s eye is credited with the creation of the perspectival, intellectually justified image depth. It is no longer binding, which is why the young artist’s works reveal a striving for individualization characteristic of contemporary art at large, and at the same time her avoidance of the dominant, her focus on detail, though she attaches no absolute art value to it, and her search for identification through art, and her search for art through personal experience reduced to the simplest elements.
Johanna Sosnowska
translated by Joanna Holzman