"Hello, Modernity !"
As befits an introduction to the art world of Julia Curyło I should begin with an equivocal paradox. Because I realized that (or at least so it seems) before our very own eyes, thanks to the efforts of several thousands of people, for the price of 6 billion of Swiss francs, we have managed to explain the meaning of certain two lines. For this is how much the LHC — The Large Hadron Collider costs, the biggest particle accelerator in the world, and simultaneously the largest technical device built by humans. The main aim behind its creation was the search for the predicted in theory and mathematical equations “God’s particle”— Higgs boson. Its empirical discovery filled (more or less) the missing link of the so called Standard Model which forms our (i.e. humanity’s) notions about the creation of the Universe. Thanks to Higgs boson the elementary particles acquire mass and without it it is difficult to explain the existence of the material world. Up until the announcement was made in July of last year about the discovery of H0, the Standard Model was the most useful, though not completely proven empirically, hypothesis which tried to fuse various theories and develop the Einsteinian paradigm we live in. In other words, it wasn’t entirely clear how particles acquire mass, becoming matter in a colloquially (though incorrectly because of the simplification) understood sense. From the Einstein’s famous equation comes that m=E/c2. The aforementioned two lines are naturally the equality sign, the sense and mechanism of which was now discovered. I began with this encouraging — containing the accomplishments of the human mind, imagination and technology alongside the readiness and willingness of thousands of people from various parts of the world to cooperate— story, not only because one of the latest great cycles of Julia Curyło’s paintings H0 particle was devoted exactly to LHC — the Large Hadron Collider and the whole scientific experiment, designed to discover the aforementioned “God’s particle”. This metaphorical description of Higgs boson serves Julia Curyło to create a vision, it must be said an ambiguous one, not devoid of ambivalence, of new cosmogony, in which the place of God-Creator is occupied by the accelerator. Its real shape, which to some degree resembles the depictions of God present in not only our tradition was referring to our iconographic depictions, painted with a visionary panache. As a matter of fact, and this applies not only to the said cycle but — it seems — to the earlier works as well, the central problem raised by the work of Julia Curyło, and by the perspective she adopted, is the perspective of spirit. H.G. Gadamer wrote that “In our daily life we proceed constantly through the coexistence of past and future. The essence of what is called ‹spirit› lies in the ability to move within the horizon of an open future and an unrepeatable past. Mnemosyne, the muse of memory and recollective appropriation, rules here as the muse of spiritual freedom. The same activity of spirit finds expression in memory and recollection, which incorporates the art of the past along with our own artistic tradition, as well as in recent daring experiments with their unprecedented deformation of form”. 1 I have this strange feeling that there is a parallel between the search conducted by physicists from CERN and that of Julia Curyło’s. If we were to assume an expanded Aristotelian definition of truth we could believe that the painted picture, in all its factuality, in the sense contained in it — being here and now, is also a vessel of meanings, and therefore truth. Truth of an artwork understood in Heideggerian terms, as an experience of a whole essence. Truth, in which, besides revealing, it remains inseparably connected to concealing and shrouding, that belong to human finitude 2. This means that in an art work there is something more than just a meaning in some inexplicable way perceived as sense. As a “creation” a painting is both an assessment of reality and the reality itself, a judgement on the topic of fundamental human experience in the world, his existence as well as the being in itself. In that sense being a thing it places itself on the left side of the equation mentioned in the introduction — it is “m”. The spiritual energy imprisoned in it (the spiritual picture, to stick with physical theories, we could call a hologram) defines its weight. What is it then and what is the essence of artistic particle H0? “God’s particle”. What about art work gives sense to this equation? And how much does the concept of sense in art differ from the one used by science? In imaginary compositions one can articulate contents that, as Kant described them, allow us “to go on to think much that cannot be said”. 3
Imagination
of Julia Curyło works a bit like LHC — various elements of the visible world
and past: contained in the art’s tradition and modern, real and imagined,
perceived and processed. Fields, which we know from the physical terminology,
here find their references in spiritual sphere — they affect and disappear,
transform and vanish. The particles whirling in this world, composed into the cobweb
of meanings collide with each other. Yet somewhere in the background lingers
the question about the presence and nature of that “God’s particle”, which adds
mass to the others, weightiness, weight characteristic of a self-conscious,
experiencing itself, essence. Worthy of admiration is the consistency with
which the artist penetrates these very ambiguous and ambivalent borderlands between
what is spiritual and material, transcendental and trivial, lofty and earthly.
The equivocality or ambiguity which permeates Julia Curyło’s canvases results
out of not yielding to the temptation of simple assessment of modernity, out of
moralization or ‹engagement›, even if it was to be only ‹engagement› on the
behalf of ‹a good taste›. There is something in this stance that Thomas Mann
described as “paradoxical nonuniformity and inconsistency of spirit and its
attitude towards the problem of human. Spirit — said Mann — is multi-layered and
any attitude to the mankind’s matters is therefore possible, even the
non-humanist or antihumanist one. Spirit is not a monolith, it does not
constitute a coherent force, determined to mould the world, life and society in
its image”. 4
One of the
basic and most important roles of culture, and especially of art, is to
integrate the spirit into reality, into warthe
dialogue between human and the specific reality surrounding him, the specific
things, people, time of year and day. Without that dimension he himself loses
pertinence and becomes Elliot’s “hollow man”, a vacuum enclosed in a cuticle
layer, unimportant, floating like “Lambs of God” or “chicks” in the air. These
inflatable props out of the artist’s paintings, floating perhaps in a
subjective sense of freedom, or, devoid of insides, only external, lazy and
satiated (as in the Breakfast
on the Beach)
represent a polysemous leitmotiv of Julia Curyło’s body of work. In that sense
she has decisively reviewed and inverted the meanings in relation to the post-modern
interpretations. The painting of mandala on one hand, contains in itself the
prefiguration of full essence, cosmic order, and on the other hand, as in for
instance Hindu art, the idea of eternal recurrence. As Milan Kundera reminds:
“(…) Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das
schwerste Gewicht). If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our
lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. (...)The
heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense
fulfilment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the
more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a
burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave
of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as
free as they are insignificant.” 5
The title
given to the exhibition by the artist herself set an ambivalent tone and a
distanced take on the modern culture in its current shape. In English it
retains its ambiguity (in case of Polish declensions it is impossible). Is it
welcoming the modernity or quite the contrary? Personally, I opt for the
interpretation where the word “hello” is used in the context of walking into
e.g. a shop with a front-sign above the door saying “Mr. Johnson”. We come in,
there’s no one inside (is the owner at the back room?), we look around and call
“Hello, Mr. Johnson!”. Uncertain
of
someone’s presence we declare our arrival. But does modernism or modernity
still exist, and if so, what does it mean and how does it look like? Maybe the
owner is missing, and there are only vending machines with beverages, coffee,
sandwiches and sweets blinking with lights under the walls, etc. The sleep of
reason produces machines. Carrying of Kunderian load, the quest for the Holy
Grail against the odds, looking for important values is difficult. Nonetheless
it is the gist of art. Otherwise it turns into kitsch or yields to the
temptations of mass produced art.
Already a
hundred years ago R.M. Rilke wrote: “Most people have (with the help of
conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest
side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything
alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it
can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against
all opposition.” 6 What impresses is the magnitude and diversity of clues left by Julia
Curyło in her paintings, which sometimes are deceptive, while at other
occasions polysemous. She basically puts all the spheres of spiritual
activities to a test for authentic presence of transcendent element, to a test for
presence of triviality’s virus. She does not do it from a position of a doctor,
neither a reformer of tainted civilization, nor a cultural activist. Rather, it
is rich in intellectual fun with the crevices discovered between sacrum and
profanum. Moreover, the crevices between profanum and its imitation, with a
typical of children dispassionate curiosity for observing the struggling modern
culture. “Hello Modernity” is certainly not a call of someone who uncritically
accepts the present norms, someone trendy. Someone who wants to be cool even though
he lacks the passion to authentically create real culture. Religion, science,
art, all of them appear to be susceptible to fetishisation, to ideologization,
and as a consequence they become utilitarianized or perhaps utilized? That
which is transcendental disappears in the brash neon blaze of artificial paradises.
The old gods lose on importance, tamed to the size of cheap devotional
articles. They are stripped of the drama reflecting the human condition.
Zbigniew Herbert wrote about this: “First there was a god of night and tempest,
a black idol without eyes, before whom they leaped, naked and smeared with
blood. Later on, in the times of the republic, there were many gods with wives,
children, creaking beds, and harmlessly exploding thunderbolts. At the end only
superstitious neurotics carried in their pockets little statues of salt,
representing the god of irony. There was no greater god at that time. Then came
the barbarians. They too valued highly the little god of irony. They would
crush it under their heels and add it to their dishes.” 7
Julia
Curyło’s art contains a strong charge of irony, furthermore the artist remains
consistent and includes herself in the stylistic of her reality, both in the
paintings and in the life, self-ironically situating herself in this world of “wonders”,
which replaced the metaphysics. Of course irony is a weapon that is very
dangerous, both to the viewer and the creator. It is easy to use it as a
cover-up for helplessness towards the quiddity, to change contemplation into
play, concentration into entertainment. The aforementioned R.M. Rilke warned:
“Don’t let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.
When you are fully creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of
life. Used purely, it too is pure, and one needn’t be ashamed of it; but if you
feel yourself becoming too familiar with it, if you are afraid of this growing
familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it
becomes small and helpless. Search into the depths of Things: there, irony
never descends — and when you arrive at the edge of greatness, find out whether
this way of perceiving the world arises from a necessity of your being. For
under the influence of serious Things it will either fall away from you (if it
is something accidental), or else (if it is really innate and belongs to you)
it will grow strong, and
become a
serious tool and take its place among the instruments
which you
can form your art with.” 8
It appears
that in case of Julia Curyło we are dealing with an innate property, an
immanent quality of her perception of the world, but also with one of the
fundamental rules she follows during making of her paintings (and not only
paintings).
For the
viewer, when irony is written into modus Vivendi of the presented art, when it
is not ostentatious, it could be a trap. Both in the reading of stylistic
devices used, the form and the conveyed meanings. This is where, I think, originate
the references to neo-pop, symbolical realism, fascination with kitsch, Jeff
Koons, activism, falling into popular trends of bashing the Pharisaism of
religious art present in the commentaries and discussions of Julia Curyło’s
works. In a nutshell, when encountering her paintings, the commentators and
reviewers very often stumble on staffage, bound against the surface. They do not
dig deep enough to reach the deeper meanings (maybe because sometimes it is
difficult to dig when we ourselves are floating above the ground…).
Similarly
misleading is the superficial lightness in choice of visual depiction of the
questions asked. Their density covers, as Immanuel Kant noted, that “concepts only
in the face of a particular, individual work ‹gain resonance›”. Hence, it is an
inverted process — the function of a concept is to create a kind of resonator
which could articulate the play of imagination. With all of their complex subject
matters and wilfulness, Julia Curyło’s paintings captivate with their form,
stretched out in a Gadamerian triad of “play, symbol and festivity”, thanks to their
form, they speak plausibly. If we are looking within art for a union of
imagination, thoughts, emotions and warrant of workshop experience and
proficiency — then the encounter with paintings by Julia Curyło fulfils these expectations
— it is a festival, more so, a joyful festival in a way. Because the invoked,
contained in them irony, is not mean, nor mordant, nor haughty. On the
contrary. One gets the impression that it was for Julia Curyło that over four
hundred year Thomas More wrote the artistic program in his prayer:
“Give me a soul that knows not
boredom,
grumblings,
sighs and laments,
nor excess
of stress, because of that
obstructing
thing called ‹I›.
Grant me,
O Lord, a sense of good humor.
Allow me
the grace to be able to take a joke
to
discover in life a bit of joy,
and to be
able to share it with others.” 9
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