Once upon a time in the East: The art of Piotr Uklanski

ArtForum, Nov, 2002 by Kate Bush

A man in a museum, surrounded by a crowd: Suddenly, he is swallowed in flames, as abruptly as a flaring match. A thirty-second performance, Untitled (The Full Burn), 1998, might stand as the emblem of Polish artist Piotr Uklanski's artistic credo: It's an image underlaid with the memory of real-life self-immolations executed at moments of political desperation. But here, safely contained in the museum, it becomes pure stunt, pure spectacle--an event of pure horror distilled, through innumerable incendiary images in Hollywood action movies, into pure entertainment. The Full Burn is an explosive yet ephemeral act that devolves into nothing more than a brief thrill in the viewer's mind. As Uklanski said in a recent magazine interview: "In the end what happens is that we end up looking at things with our mouths open, fascinated, regardless of what we watch, whether it's a Nazi flick or people on fire."

Uklanski's is an art that does not so much critique "spectacular" culture as delight in the force of its seductions. In Ghent last winter, as his contribution to the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst's 2001 group exhibition "Casino," he lit up the vast imperial facade of the neighboring Museum voor Schone Kunsten. Strings of beaded lights described the building's entire architectural profile, threading along the edges and planes, columns and cornices, so that by night the slightly pompous Neoclassical building was transformed into an illuminated edifice flashy enough for Las Vegas. In 2000, as part of P.S. I's "Greater New York" exhibition, he floated a gigantic helium balloon in the sky and filled it with tungsten light to mimic a full moon, producing a copy seemingly more lustrous than the original it lay alongside. Light, whether romantically filtered in Untitled (Twin Moons), 1999, or coruscatingly real in Untitled (The Full Burn), appears frequently as both subject and source, metaphor and means, of Uk lanski's work in sculpture and photography. In pursuing such instant, shining pleasures, the artist is well aware he runs the risk of their antithesis, a temporary and empty seduction. But, following Baudrillard, who deemed the spectacle "not to be decried, but celebrated as the inevitable theater of all existence," he sees this situation as not cause for particular regret but a fact to be lived with and liked. His art exploits spectacle in order to meditate on the simultaneous intensity and transience of aesthetic experience itself. It's a difficult art to pursue, one that enters into seduction and yet reflects upon it, and it's been Uklanski's distinctive achievement to forge a body of works that cultivate a certain nonchalance--a sense of not trying too hard--while opening up much larger questions to do with the engagement of the viewer and the status of artistic experience in an age dominated by the popular media.

Guy Debord insisted that the spectacle was not merely the result of the proliferation and ubiquity of images in capitalist society, but rather was constructed in a more complex way--not as a concatenation of images "but [as] a social relation among people, mediated by images." Whereas for Debord this situation amounted to false consciousness and the damaging substitution of representation for real experience, for Uklanski it has been a positive arena of investigation. His signature piece, the sound-interactive, light-pulsating Dance Floor, 1996, conjoined the formality of the modernist grid and the aesthetics of a Saturday night disco and might initially be viewed as a one-liner at Minimalism's expense. Ultimately though, the sculpture is more concerned with its audience than with its art history: a work of art entirely premised on and activated by people, who in turn interact with one another on it. By night the floor throngs with DJs and dancers; by day, shoe scuffed and cigarette littered, it dissipates in to a wan and slightly sordid surface, as melancholy as any morning after. Endlessly flexible, the floor has functioned in many different social contexts--in the Museum of Modern Art in New York's Sculpture Garden, in numerous gallery spaces, in an office workers' canteen. As Uklanski observed in the MOMA exhibition catalogue, he aimed to create an object "that would be all generosity and no ideology. An object that would give and give and give but that would, at the end of the night, be unknowable, as its true nature resides in our own pleasure."

The Nazis, 1998, like Dance Floor, is a work whose meaning lies not within itself but within the mind of the spectator. The piece comprises 166 film stills and poster images culled from American and European postwar cinema, each picture showing the head and shoulders of an actor playing a Nazi. Attacked in London as a magnet for neofascists, assaulted in Warsaw as an inflammatory reminder of a repressed past, and dismissed in New York as a banal comment on Hollywood's glamorization of evil, The Nazis is a deceptively simple experiment in the reception of signs across different contexts. Here Uklanski proves the power of the spectacle to render meaning not vacuously transparent but endlessly volatile. The passionate, sometimes violent responses provoked by a mere collection of film stills is proof in action of the theory of the spectacle: People tend to believe in the reality of the representation. On one level, The Nazis is simply what it is: a photographic archive of the filmic trope of the Nazi as stereotyp ical bad guy, a visual anthology of more or less familiar images in mass-cultural circulation, some scary (Yul Brenner in Triple Cross), some sexy (Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List), some as downright improbable as Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek Episode Fifty-two. On another, it can be read allegorically as a comment on the end of history, in an age where real events reach us always already mediated. On yet another level, it touches on a much darker truth: the deep, continuing allure of fascist aesthetics as the ultimate form of fetishized power. Just as the Nazis, masters of the spectacle, understood the intimate connection between power and representation, presenting aesthetic displays designed to compel belief, so Uklanski suggests that art is only a specter of absorption proposed to the gaze of the spectator, an idea he connotes in the ultrahigh, mirrorlike gloss of his photographs' surfaces.