Janek Simon on More Than Another Polish Year

Krzysztof Cichoń: It looks as though this is the first Malagasy-Polish cultural contact in recent years.

Janek Simon: Definitely. Although one of the priests told me about a pilgrimage by a dozen or so Malagasy people to Łagiewniki. Some of them left the pilgrimage and chose a new life in Poland.

K. C.: Were there more Malagasy or white people at the exhibition?

J. S.: Malagasy people. A few white people I had met at the hotel or in bars came to the opening. There were also several young Malagasy artists who painted baobabs or something of that kind. Poles who had seen the posters came. I think a few people also walked in from the street after seeing that there was free wine.

K. C.: Was the wine local?

J. S.: Yes, white.

K. C.: But the glasses were probably Chinese?

J. S.: Yes, I bought twenty Chinese wine glasses at the market.

K. C.: There were more guests, so, just like in Europe, there was not enough for everyone.

J. S.: There was not.

K. C.: Did you try to interest any ‘official bodies’?

J. S.: Yes, the first thing I did was go to the Ministry of Culture. Interestingly, over there it is the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

K. C.: Ours will be the same before long.

J. S.: But with my French I was unable to reach any decision-makers. That did not work. I did, however, invite people from the Goethe-Institut, who came to the opening.

K. C.: And what happened? Did they congratulate you?

J. S.: They were rather strange. I do not think they liked the idea of the exhibition; it seemed to me that they treated it as criticism directed at them.

K. C.: I think they were partly right.

J. S.: Well, the Institut Français in particular is an instrument for maintaining cultural domination over former colonies.

K. C.: And what language were the posters in?

J. S.: French and Polish.

K. C.: Not Malagasy?

J. S.: No. They should have been in Malagasy; I thought about it, but I printed them in Poland and had no one to translate them.

K. C.: There is no such thing as Polish culture?

J. S.: I prefer to speak about culture in Poland rather than Polish culture. I participated in several projects promoting precisely Polish culture abroad and, I think during my stay in Weimar, realised that it is a kind of empty form.

K. C.: Perhaps that results from politics?

J. S.: Yes, it results from politics; it is external state PR. One has to ask whether one wants to participate in it and on what terms.

K. C.: There is not a single Pole in your Madagascar project.

J. S.: That was the premise. There are works by a Slovak, a Czech group, two Bulgarians and a Romanian. If I had chosen Poles, it would still have been the promotion of Polish culture. I did not want to do that, so I chose only foreign artists. The exhibition I managed to assemble from their works refers to Poland’s situation and its problems. This demonstrates that art made outside Poland can refer to our reality.

K. C.: In Antananarivo you met the local Polish community…

J. S.: Yes, all four of them.

K. C.: How did you explain that a Polish exhibition featured two Bulgarians, a Czech group…

J. S.: In the same way I have explained it to you, but we did not discuss it very much. They accepted it, and that was that. The most emotional response was provoked by the rather drastic, anti-war, anti-American work Human Meat by the Guma Guar group. I was even worried that it might cause some controversy, but that was the most popular work, including among the Poles.

K. C.: Because it is a highly legible work, referring to events that everyone in Poland and Madagascar follows avidly on television as they unfold.

J. S.: All the works were fairly intelligible; that was how I chose them.

K. C.: Now I shall look for colonial thinking on your part. You have already mentioned this in an interview: ‘even despite the choice of obvious, even blunt works, they provoked no lively reaction’. If you were making an exhibition for the Venice Biennale or even in Weimar, would you have had no hesitation in choosing such ‘blunt works’, or would you have been subtler? Was the choice not dictated by a conviction that, when travelling somewhere distant on a somewhat ethnographic expedition, one should take obvious works…

J. S.: That was partly the case. For me, one interesting strand in the project was confronting contemporary events and strategies with a place where there was no context whatsoever for their reception. It seemed to me that if I took subtle works there, I would be condemning myself to failure in advance; no one would understand them…

K. C.: So it would have ended in the same way…

J. S.: I know that now. When I took these works, I thought there was a chance they would be understood. It turned out they were not.

K. C.: The only one that ‘worked’ was the already mentioned piece about the war in Iraq.

J. C.: Yes, Human Meat. The other works referred to problems that simply do not exist in Madagascar. There is no problem of the politicisation of the Church or the degradation of public space…

K. C.: It follows, first, that not everything is global yet and, second, that artists always take the specificity of the places where they exhibit into account. Kraków and Krosno are not different enough, but Kraków and Antananarivo are. This is contrary to the often-declared universality of art’s language. Contrary to the post-Romantic conviction that the artist is a medium through whom an idea appears, an idea the artist serves while disregarding context, time and place. Yet one always calculates: will it work or not?

J. S.: That was not the principal criterion for selecting the works, however. They happened to be obvious, but that was not what I was looking for. Above all, I sought works by foreign artists that could have been made in Poland and referred to Polish problems; that was the main criterion.

K. C.: So what you opened there was an exhibition of the culture of a united Europe.

J. S.: More of Eastern Europe. My personal experience confirms that we understand one another well and that a certain Central European similarity does exist.

K. C.: This exhibition looks like a sociological project studying the disintegration of the category of nation. As a trained sociologist, you ought to comment on that somehow.

J. S.: The category of nation is losing importance, at least in Europe. At one point while working on the exhibition in Madagascar, I realised that three stages in this process could be distinguished. First, at the end of the eighteenth century, there is Beniowski; at that time, the concept of nation did not have universal reach…

K. C.: In other words, as today: either a person is wealthy and travels, or is a peasant effectively tied to one place…

J. S.: Who was sometimes the subject of a German and sometimes of a Pole, which mattered little to him. Then, in the nineteenth century, the nation-state appeared and sought its heroes; Beniowski was annexed by Hungarians, Slovaks and Poles. Later still came the patriotism of the interwar period, real patriotism. It was a powerful social idea—people contributed money to buy a destroyer for the Polish navy. While reading materials about Madagascar, I realised that this had been a positive idea.

K. C.: Do you think no one would contribute today?

J. S.: I think the days of contributing towards destroyers are over.

K. C.: A pity—it is a beautiful art project and worth realising. After all, the entire nation contributing towards a dozen or so F-16s likewise has chiefly symbolic significance.

J. S.: Of course, that pre-war patriotism was pathologised by National Democratic thought. Finally, there is the third stage, when the nation-state is disintegrating.

K. C.: That is in Europe, because when you met the four-person Polish community it was like travelling back in time.

J. S.: Somewhat. It was a good experience for me because in Madagascar I found a trace of a model of Polishness that I accept. From childhood, my anti-communist family strongly indoctrinated me with the idea that Poland had existed before the war and what existed now was not Poland at all. I always had a certain aversion to that Poland. It changed briefly in the 1990s, but later it turned out that the aversion had remained somewhere within me. This was precisely what made it a good experience. I rediscovered a Polishness I accept in those adventurers who came there partly because they were looking for gold. Sienkiewicz-like, somewhat anarchic figures, longing for Poland.

K. C.: They would probably have preferred to see an exhibition of the sursum corda variety.

J. S.: Certainly. With no access to contemporary culture, let alone Polish culture, it is difficult to expect a highly developed awareness.

K. C.: Perhaps, since as you said the presence of contemporary art is difficult to notice in that culture, some planetary balance is at work. Here we have a great deal of contemporary art. Everyone knows about it, attends and debates, and at the same time tends not to need national identification. Then there are places such as Madagascar, where a minority feels such a need but has no appetite for contemporary art.

J. S.: There is no contemporary culture there at all.

K. C.: Perhaps no one needs it.

J. S.: I do not know what that results from. Perhaps from civilisational underdevelopment?

K. C.: Do you believe in the idea of progress?

J. S.: I believe in the idea of progress.

K. C.: How do you imagine progress in Madagascar’s capital?

J. S.: Some field of discussion, rational discussion, should appear, not necessarily connected with art. A discussion in which problems are worked through and reflected upon.

K. C.: Making people discuss problems more often.

J. S.: Of course. This is an outcome of history. If we compare the level of such discussion in England and Poland, we notice a drastic difference; going further, there is a drastic difference between the level of discussion in Poland and Madagascar. One can see the influence of their different histories.

K. C.: I always imagined ladies and gentlemen sitting in the Ministry of Culture and wondering precisely what else could be done to expand the field of discussion. By organising, for example, a Polish Year in France.

J. S.: I doubt anyone at the Ministry of Culture asks themselves: why are we doing this? It is more a matter of inertia. We do it because there is money, because it is done, because Polish culture exists and must be promoted. Most projects have no idea behind them; they operate on the principle of showing seven Polish artists. Nothing comes of it; it produces no value and no discussion.

K. C.: Perhaps if the Ministry of Culture organised an exhibition of Polish art on Antananarivo’s main street, it would be easier to establish contact. There would be more discussion after the opening and a greater response.

J. S.: Certainly. I went there alone and opened the exhibition two and a half weeks after arriving. It would be difficult to expect the president to attend. The Ministry might have been able to produce a greater effect locally, but that was not really my concern. For me it was a mission impossible. The project succeeded the moment the exhibition came into being. Nevertheless, there are further effects. I met the four Poles, who want to establish a Polish-Malagasy association. I am thinking about continuing it with them. I had the idea of creating a Polish Library in Madagascar. I would like to send them books…

K. C.: Which ones? What will you send them, and what would they like?

J. S.: I do not know what they would like—certainly not what I shall send them. I thought it might be possible to create a canon, a Polish Library that would promote a model of a new Pole. A canon promoting attitudes that would be Polish, but in a positive sense.

K. C.: Do you believe it is possible to create such a canon today?

J. S.: Yes, I think so; I believe it can be started. I would like to invite acquaintances from the literary world to help create it, because I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about Polish literature to do it alone. There are almost no Polish books in Madagascar. When a parcel containing 150 books suddenly arrives, they will inevitably read them out of boredom.

K. C.: This is a good moment to realise how the distinction is becoming blurred between an art project and what was once simply called a life choice, a choice made at one’s own risk. After the war, Andrzej Bobkowski became convinced that Europe was no longer bearable. He travelled to Guatemala and began running a shop selling model aircraft. At first it did not do very well. Today he could take such an idea to Atlas Sztuki, for example, and say: I have an art project entitled Club Aeromodelista Guatemalteco; I shall build flying model aircraft in Guatemala City…

J. S.: I am entirely in favour. The theme of the postmodern integration of art and life is important to me…

K. C.: Before that integration became postmodern, it was Romantic for a while. Let us return to you. If I were to describe the work of Janek Simon, the cheerful VJ from Kraków, the story would be organised according to a movement away from what is exceptionally spectacular and visual, such as Carpet or Departure, towards things that are more readily told about than looked at, such as Polish Year in Madagascar.

J. S.: For me, the turning-point project was a homemade electronic clock. It arose from earlier actions and made me conscious of a particular method. I always try to do everything myself. I prefer to learn something myself than look for a programmer or electronics engineer. I had to master new skills—in the case of Carpet, game programming; in the case of Departure, 3D animation. I always use the Internet as a source of information. Google is God. I always managed to learn all these things…

K. C.: Janek Simon’s Künstlerroman in progress. So you are a self-taught artist.

J. S.: I used that consciously while working on the clock. I conducted an experiment: how long would it take me to learn enough basic electronics to construct a clock from scratch? It took more than two months.

K. C.: What happened to the clock?

J. S.: I made it in an edition of three…

K. C.: Did you sell them?

J. S.: I sold one to a public art collection, to the museum in Niepołomice. The second is well on its way to being sold to a private collection in Sweden.

K. C. It is almost a return of Arts and Crafts in an electronics version.

J. S.: The clock was already devoid of visual qualities; of course, it did not look like a normal clock and was much larger. Generally speaking, it was a performance that left an object behind. I adopted that method. In the case of Polish Year in Madagascar it is less pronounced, although considering all the research and how much I learnt about the history of the Madagascar Plan, there is a kind of operation on knowledge in it too. In other projects I am making now, however, it is obvious—I simply master a fragment of knowledge and use it. Recently I have taken a liking to lectures. The first lecture I gave, last year, concerned Edible Plants and Animals of Lower Saxony. It took place in Wolfsburg…

K. C.: Wolfsburg is in Lower Saxony?

J. S.: Yes. I ordered fifteen books through Amazon, studied them and made a lecture lasting about forty-five minutes. I delivered it at the opening of a group exhibition. It took the form of a performance with slides.

K. C.: Can I tell students, who usually write their papers in the same way with Google’s help, that they are making contemporary art, provided they approach it consciously?

J. S.: Yes, they only need a good justification for choosing one subject rather than another.

K. C.: And why specifically the edible plants and animals of Lower Saxony?

J. S.: It was an exhibition within the Fictional Century project concerning the future of industrial cities—Wolfsburg and Nowa Huta. Wolfsburg is a city built beside the Volkswagen factory. It is a very bourgeois, wealthy city. I decided to comment on that situation in this way. It was a comment on the fact that the contentment prevailing there might one day end, and the lawyers and doctors attending the opening at the Kunstverein would have to look for edible roots.

K. C.: Did you take questions?

J. S.: I finish without questions. But they liked it. It turned out that the subject awakened memories among older people: ‘I remember, we ate dandelions.’ Now in the United States I shall learn to pick locks with improvised tools.

K. C.: Did you find the literature online?

J. S.: Yes, of course. Curiosity is a powerful motive in my activity. This form of practice allows me to satisfy that curiosity and learn assorted new things.

K. C.: Do you not have the impression that a large part of the most contemporary art is beginning to resemble a strange travel agency? Breaking patterns, artists travel to strange places and do still stranger things there. Being an artist is increasingly connected with the idea of travel and nomadism. Chiefly because of the sheer number of projects, their touristic character shows through ever more clearly.

J. S.: To some extent. For me, a good metaphor for the artist is a snowboarder…

K. C.: Do you snowboard?

J. S.: Unfortunately, rarely. Skiers travel down a piste, along a route, while snowboarders go through the forest, off to the side. What I am about to say could be taken as conceited—which I would not want—but it seems to me that most people repeat scripts existing in society through their behaviour. An artist is a snowboarder who tries to devise new scripts, which is why I chose picking locks with improvised tools as a subject. It is a metaphor for what we are discussing.

K. C.: If we accept your viewpoint, then from one generation to the next the number of scripts noticed and accepted as attractive should increase. In the most optimistic version, we would see progressive accumulation; rather than repeating existing scripts, an increasing number of people should invent their own.

J. S.: I think that is very good. It provides satisfaction and enables self-realisation.

K. C.: We return to the idea of progress. Perhaps an artist is simply an active, creative person for whom the number of stimuli present, for example, in the old town of Łódź or Kraków seems decidedly too small, and who therefore tries to move around the world realising ideas. How does the artist differ from Murray’s homo festivus, who likewise cannot sit still and is continually travelling to see the Pope, attend the World Cup, hear Wagner in Bayreuth or ski in Croatia?

J. S.: An artist does not go to the World Cup but, if anything, to the sheep-throwing championship in Afghanistan. The artist chooses what is not mass-produced and not obvious. Artists have a compulsion to create new situations, and that is the difference. The idea of bohemia—an alternative social structure—is important too.

K. C.: It somewhat resembles chasing the rabbit. As soon as the media notice something and declare it new, therefore good, a crowd appears and one has to begin again elsewhere—in Madagascar, for example.

J. S.: There is always a possibility that what we do will become attractive and the dominant order of values will make an offer to buy it. Then one faces a moral choice.

K. C.: I think that has already happened to you. You sold one clock, and the other is about to sell…

J. S.: I do not think it is that kind of situation. I make no compromises. I do nothing in order to sell it; if someone wants to buy it, very good. That allows me not to take paid work that has no meaning.

K. C.: Returning to the historical strand, what surprised you most while gathering material about the Madagascar Plan?

J. S.: I found the publications of the Maritime and Colonial League relatively easily. I understood that patriotism, almost nationalism, which had seemed rather sinister to me, had a positive significance at the time. I shall want to emphasise that during the exhibition.

K. C.: In the account you wrote during your stay in Madagascar, you quote a passage from Arkady Fiedler, whose propagandistically enthusiastic book was titled Tomorrow in Madagascar. Fiedler uses highly vivid language when praising Polish colonisation: ‘Here in Madagascar no foreign sun caresses, no foreign hand strokes. Here it is easier to fall than stand. Yet they stood firm. They shook off the Greeks’ envious paw, seized the Indians by the throat, won over the Malagasy, turned the water to their own mill, bent fate towards a smile (…)’

J. S.: For me, Fiedler’s language has a great deal of charm; I like it…

K. C.: Fiedler is not republished now…

J. S.: But it is not a question of language, only of a change in mentality. His work contains many racist or sexist situations that are absolutely unacceptable today. For Fiedler, the colonial relationship was natural.

K. C.: When I read texts about contemporary art, I increasingly feel that they are products of a milieu as determined as the pre-war Maritime and Colonial League. And equally predictable. Fiedler’s world demanded vigour, physical and spiritual fortitude, and pro-state optimism. Today’s metropolitan followers of art are required to maintain distance and are unable to address subjects such as religion or patriotism except ironically. Do you not think that in a moment this will appear as exotic and anachronistic as the League’s publications?

J. S.: It may.

K. C.: After all, we are at the dawn of a great project to restore patriotism through state methods…

J. S.: I think it is doomed to drastic failure. My Madagascar idea arose before the election; it has now gained political relevance because those in power refer to the patriotism of the interwar period. Historical policy, correcting falsehoods in history—all of this refers to the tradition of the Second Polish Republic.