Category: interview
Subject: Miroslaw Balka on his
exhibition Fragment and his work.
Date of the conversation: 5th of
September 2014
Linked
to the commemoration of Operation Market Garden, a failed military intervention
during World War II near the Dutch city of Arnhem, the international acclaimed
visual artist Miroslaw Balka (Warsaw 1958) will show his extensive work Fragment in Museum Arnhem from the 6th
of September 2014 till the 25th of January 2015. Fragment, exhibited in the southern wing of the museum, consists of
a series of video and sound installations most of them based on footage made by
the artist during his visits to the former Nazi extermination camps in Poland.
Why do you confront yourself and the visitor
with the unfathomable sad and seemingly meaningless mass prosecution of
civilians during the Second World War? Is it for the same reasons your friend,
the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman now living in Leeds, writes about
seemingly unsolvable issues such as the relation between the holocaust and
modernity and the persistence of criminality, insecurity, exclusion and fear in
today’s affluent societies?
For me
wars are not only about battles. They make civilians suffer. It was like that a
hundred years ago and it is now. Nothing has changed. Zygmunt Bauman in his
books argues for the importance of the margins and marginalized people in so
called healthy societies. He talks about pain as I do. There is no other way to
face the facts and resolve problems than to make them a point of discussion.
The title of your solo exhibition in Arnhem is Fragment. Fragments normally belong or
refer to a whole. But is there, to your idea, such a thing as a whole or a
whole story?
I’m
sceptical about the concept of a whole and the idea that history or life could
have a general content or meaning. Life and history are fragmented. They are
lived and witnessed by individuals. If you take a bus after this interview and
the bus is involved in a serious traffic accident, there is obviously only one
and the same bus and one accident. Yet the injuries of the individual bus
passengers will be different. The passengers will tell different stories about
what happened and their wounds will in the end leave different scars. My work Fragment deals with history and history
to my mind is a discussion about the scars after the wounds stopped bleeding.
The idea of the fragment to me has also another meaning, another importance.
For me it is related to a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen called The Snow Queen. Andersen tale is about a
magical mirror. The mirror distorts. It only shows the ugly and repulsive side
of people and things it mirrors. By misfortune the mirror is scattered on earth
in countless pieces. One of the characters in Andersen’s tale, Kai a boy, is
hit by one of the shards. The fragment distorts his perception. He is angry
with other people and full of a sudden admiration for the Snow Queen, the
personification of cold reason and inhuman perfection. To me all this, the
fragmented character of life, the marks it leaves and the meaning hidden in
Andersen’s tale, are interwoven.
Your work relates to evil, loss, death and
decay. You yourself have stressed the poetical side of your work. But what does
poetry mean to you?
For me,
reading poetry is very important. The poetry I like has to do with everyday
life. In my view, one of poetry’s highest forms is the Japanese haiku. The
haiku is short and down to earth, no more than a few simple gestures, yet full
of hidden meaning. Poetry is kindred to the fragment. Both are sources of human
richness. A good poem is like a good trailer of
a film. The film hasn’t been made yet, but we can see it by means of our
imagination, each of us imagining a different version. What a good poem says,
all that it refers to, can be pieced together in seemingly countless ways.
Prose is more objective and collective. .It has a general sense we have to
acknowledge and respect. Poetry, on the contrary, is open. Because of its
endless possibilities for interpretation it’s truly private. What it means is
yours and yours alone.
But is poetry embellishment, does it abate the
sour side of life?
Not to
me. Poetry is pain. It’s about the dark side of life. Prose deals with reason,
poetry is about feeling and pain is an important feeling.
It seems obvious that there is poetry in a work
such as HEAL, a sculpture you made
for the University of California in Mission Bay San Francisco. Poetry was
obvious in How It Is, the work you
made in Tate Modern, for after going into the dark there was a return to the
light. But where is poetry in your opinion in the work you made for Sonsbeek
’93 or a work such as Fragment?
Like
most of my work, HEAL in San Francisco, was not based on some abstract concept.
I started by investigating the Mission Bay area and its surroundings. HEAL was
inspired partly by the so-called Hollywood Sign, the letters spelling the name
Hollywood in Los Angeles. But a more important fact to me was the site HEAL was
planned for. My work was ordered by the medical department based in a
strikingly high tech and scientific environment. What is medical care in an
environment like this? Is it purely a technical affair, like fixing a machine,
or has it something to do with healing in a broader sense? The original meaning
of ‘healing’ is not only related to the body, but to the soul as well. Healing
has shamanistic roots and in shamanism body and soul are not separated.
Important to me is that the work casts a shadow. Rain or clouds are rare in
California. The sunlight is everywhere and my wish was to offer some kind of
relief by way of the shadows the letters of the word ‘heal’ cast down. Relief
is also offered by the water fountain installed in one of the legs of the work.
Providing water under these circumstances is a practical service to the public.
But water from a fountain in most cultures is also related to healing. In old
tales young men leave the family house to search for water from magical wells
to save their loved-ones from illness and death. These ideas and interrelated themes
made up the poetry of my work in San Francisco. I brought things together that
are important to me. In my view the important things have long roots. You can
see the work I made as a tree. What fed the work, the ideas that made it come
into being and are related to it, are the roots. These roots are not always
directly visible. I don’t think it’s a problem if they are ignored or not
noticed by the public. You can stay and enjoy yourself on the branches, so to
speak. But for me as an artist it’s important to mind about the roots. If I
wouldn’t, the trees I build in my work would fall over.
How It
Is, my work in Tate Modern in 2009, was rooted in other issues. The
experience of utter darkness and a return to light, as you said, played a role.
For Sonsbeek ’93 I made two works on three locations. The first one was located
near the bridge. It was a concrete object shaped as an opened parachute upside
down. It was sunk into the ground, forming a big hole. This of course referred
to the historical events on the site that was the scene of the airborne
operation Market Garden in and around Arnhem in September 1944. Young men
during these events were parachuted and landed in hell and death. The fact that
my sculpture was something of a big hole in the ground near the bridge was
important. Standing on the bridge, looking down into the hole, made you shiver.
The hole was not only visible; you could ‘feel’ it. Important to me as well,
something poetical, was the difference between perception and understanding.
Down on the ground, standing close to the sculpture, you could see the concrete
brim, but you could not see what the object was shaped like. Being close to it,
didn’t mean you simple saw what it was. In order to see and understand, you had
to distance yourself; go up the bridge and look down. After the exhibition the
sculpture became something of a problem. People threw in garbage from the
bridge. The city council suggested covering the hole with perspex, but to me
the fact that the whole was open and thus ‘palpable’ was essential. So the work
was removed and destroyed.
The other work existed of two parts. Sonsbeek
originally was an exhibition in the park of Sonsbeek, but from the seventies of
the last century it started to spread to other locations, something that was
motivated by new ideas about art and the relation between art, nature and the
city. In preparing for the work I was asked to make, my attention was drawn by
Moscowa, the largest and oldest cemetery of the town. What fascinates me is the
fact that even after life some people are punished by exclusion for what they
did or simply for what they were.
Traditionally people who committed suicide and other outsiders were excluded
from common burial sites. Referring to these perennial phenomena of punishment
and exclusion, I made a simple, open double tomb with two concrete seats to sit
and contemplate. This double tomb was located just outside the fence of the
cemetery. The earth excavated to make room for the tombs I transported to a
place in town were the earth was stored in a metal case and covered with an
electric warming blanket to bring it to human body temperature. This warming up
for me was a way to take care of the earth that stood for the excluded.
What if someone would ask you pick an adequate
guideline for life? The choice would be between a quote from the poem Helian written just before the Great War
of 1914-1918 by the Austrian poet Georg Trakl or a quote from a poem entitled Incantation written in 1968 by the
Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz. The quote from Trakl reads: ‘Schön ist der Mensch
und erscheinend im Dunkel’ (Beautiful is man and
appearing in darkness). The quote from Milosz in translation reads:
‘Human reason is beautiful and invincible. / No bars, no barbed wire, no
pulping of books, /No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.’ What
would you pick: the somewhat gloomy line of Trakl or the words of Milosz,
undoubtedly more optimistic in outlook?
1968,
the date of Milosz’s poem, is of interest. You could call it a year of
rebellion and cultural change in the West of Europe. In the east it was a year
of repression. Inspired by the Russians and in reaction to the Israeli victory
over the Arabs in the Six-Day War, the Polish communist government incited
Polish citizens of Jewish origin to leave the country. It was a state organised
anti-Semitic campaign. Milosz praise of human reason set against this
background strikes me. But to be honest, I feel I have little in common with
Czeslaw Milosz as a poet. His work to my taste is somewhat high blown. Only
later in life and in his poetry he landed on earth. I prefer another Polish
poet, Tadeusz
Różewicz, but Różewicz is not on the list. So my choice would be Trakl. Trakl
makes sense to me. Darkness as a surrounding is necessary to see the individual
as a light. In general I have more in common with people like Trakl and, as you
may know, the poet Paul Celan.
In what way is your
work inspired by Celan?
He is one of my inspirations, but not in a literal sense. What inspires
me and encourages me in the work of Paul Celan is a familiar sensibility. His
work exhales a kindred way of taking notice of the world and life. It reflects
openness, a commitment to experience, not only by way of the intellect or
vision, but by way of the body, its movement, all its senses and its nervous
system. What I show in Arnhem is not only about ideas and visible things. It
reflects my bodily presence and my movements on the places I filmed. In
arranging the different works, on the floor, the walls and ceiling, I tried to
recreate this bodily aspect as well. I hope the way my work is arranged will
induce visitors not only to look, but to pay attention to their own movements
and their own body when going through the consecutive rooms of the exhibition. Fragment was shown before in Warsaw,
Moscow and Berlin. No museum is the same. Arnhem has something special. The
last room of the exhibition offers a beautiful view on the slope of the hill
the museum is build on and on the Rhine flowing west. In front of you is the
tree, where in 1993 on a platform my good friend Pepe Espaliú, performed his
work El Nido, The Nest. Sad enough, he died shortly afterwards. The tree and the
memories of Pepe and the view with the river make this exhibition of Fragment special to me. After going
through all these dark rooms you can go behind the last projection wall with
images of the Birkenau pond and have a look at the view outside. The visitor
must notice that in the end there is light. Miroslaw Balka is not only about
darkness.
More information
Catalogue: Bauman Zygmunt, Marek Goździewski, Julian Heynen, Piotr Krajewski, and
Frances Morris, Miroslaw Balka. Fragment. Warsaw,
Centre for Contemporary Art, 2011.