You have lost
the capacity to live. You are all of one piece.[i]
As
I write, I keep a photograph of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, (nickname Witkacy)
to the right of my page. It is there to remind me of the space between
experience and account. In Fright (1931), the Polish playwright—add to
this painter, novelist, philosopher, photographer, historiographer, art and
cultural critic—appears unsettled. Witkacy embodies Fright with wide eyes;
bottom lip gently curled downward, hands framing cheeks, fingers slightly
blurred to imply the physical rigidity in attendance. He depicts the titular
emotion with an air of exaggeration that was common to all of his
representational forms. [If we can, for a moment, view Witkacy’s work with
double vision, we might see a sight line that extends from Julia Margaret
Cameron’s objective treatment of her subjects via calamitous allegorical
tableaux, to the photographs of Annie Leibovitz, who houses her obsession with
the archetype in the stretchy celebrity body. This sight line comprehends those
artists who pursue the nature of being as
subject, only because it pays the greatest returns]. And so it is that Fright’s naivety, the way in which it privileges
the emotional over the figurative in pursuit of representation, is central to
its affect. As a seized portrait
of indignity and humiliation it is—necessarily—too much.
As a man, Witkacy was taut,
intense, always on. Thus uneasy, we
can understand Witkacy as forever working in the mirror, persistently re-arranging/deranging
himself in front of whatever landscape happened to be returned by the glass.
There are many biographical details, too convenient to overlook here, that
point to Witkacy’s pursuit of the ontological and define his technique as one
of assemblage: his portraits and self-portraits depict the subject in motion or
in multiple, his nickname is a portmanteau of his middle and last names, he had
an unsteady style and took to dressing in varied costumes, lurid jumpers,
robes, and berets and–finally–when the Polish Ministry of Culture exhumed his
remains and moved his grave to a new site in 1994, genetic testing on the bones
concluded that they belonged not to Witkacy, but to an unidentified young
woman.[ii] If it were not for the corroboration of
witnesses and the indelible proof he left of his existence via his archive, we
might have cast Witkacy as a harmless, yet grotesque, chimera.
For
John Gillies, assemblage is also a critical method. As an artist, his propensity
to move between things—video, performance, sound, music, film, theatre,
photography and installation—in order to embrace the contradictions of life and
representation, might be the reason he was drawn to take on the scattered Witkacy
as a subject [Witkacy & Malinowski: a
cinematic séance in 23 scenes (2015 - 2017)]. If
Witkacy could be proposed as a model for Gillies’ practice—as I am attempting to
do here—then we might find some measure of the necessary distance Gillies has traveled
between subjects, mediums and disciplines over his more than thirty year
career.
 |
| John Gillies Witkacy and Malinowski in 296 shots |
In Gillies’ work, the difference between experience and account
is mended by the act of citation—literary, theatrical, artistic and historical
quotation are invoked to produce speculative narratives in which subjects speak
into the gaps of their pasts. In the multi-channel video installation Parsifals (1987), the 12th
Century tale of Parsifal’s quest for the Holy Grail fuses with Wagner’s 19th
Century opera of the same name, via a number of surplus TVs on the floor. Wagner’s opera is audible, but only through a
recording of it taken from a radio, in the midst of a thunderstorm. This aspect
of the work feels particularly located in the rural—as the Australian bush is a
place where other worlds arrive through bad reception and crackling static, or
they don’t arrive at all. The Holy Grail offered those who unearthed it, complete self-realisation.
In Gillies’ telling of it, The Holy Grail is found and the self is illuminated,
albeit by the buzzing 4:3 of the CRT monitors; here commodities fatefully offer
purchasable transcendence.
Actors are tasked with the incredible directive of “being
present”. Witkacy wrote that, "people are ghosts pretending to be
people." Like
Witkacy, Gillies notices artifice and adopts it as a formal language in an
attempt to faithfully render the discontinuities of the self and consider the
nature of a fractured reality.
In Techno/Dumb/Show (1991), made in
collaboration with The Sydney Front, Gillies began to pit melodrama against authentic
representation. Sweaty, euphoric and pained faces fill the frame. Through
spasmodic editing, bodies contort, repeat, contort and release; choreography
and improvisation collide. The work eschews narrative in favour of “a festive catalogue
of histrionic gestures”. Gillies’ Mise-en-scène, music and direction contribute
to a spectacle in which performance - read presence - is compromised by
ecstatic and ordinary emotional states, by “dislocation, pleasure, reverie and
vertigo” [iii],
by the act of losing, rather than finding, oneself.
[Witkacy’s]
photographs from the 1920s and 1930s fall into two categories: metaphysical
portraits and “Life Theatre”. The metaphysical portraits are psychological
interpretations of the subject revealing the fragile sense of identity of self
and consequently a heightened awareness of the mystery and horror of
existence...On the other hand, the Life Theatre photographs are comical poses
revealing life as adventure, play, a game, and infinite possibilities.[iv]
Video, film and performance, mediums to which Gillies most
consistently returns, are premised on deception. Via illusion, they colonise inhabited
realities, at the same time as they call into question themselves. Video, in
particular, has the capacity to loop and repeat, making it a recursive and well
suited to critiques of identity and histories—two thematic strains in Gillies’
own bodies of work. In Divide
(2004/2016), a nation emerges from the collective memory of its introduced inhabitants.
Incongruous things—an ant mound, a Chinese opera singer, men and animals—are cut
to fit. The work is punctuated with these unlikely, yet familiar, amalgams. But
if you have watched the Australian landscape from the window of a moving train
[as you can so wonderfully in Witkacy
& Malinowski...] or walked for absent miles through dense indifferent
bush to find a beach at the end with a barbeque cemented on it or admired a
purple shroud of Paterson’s Curse or looked past an outcrop of granite and
serrated tussock to
notice teams of sheep stepping their desire lines across deforested earth, then
you already know that invasion here is not the exception, but the rule.
We are assembled through desire, accident,
chance and mistake. If the future, as Gillies’ has stated, is in the act of
being made from fragments of the past, then it is possible that the present
doesn’t maintain a stratified position between these two positions but is,
rather, a shifting state of infinite, dizzying progress and regression. Selfhood,
like the Nation or the Landscape or the World, is best navigated when we
understand it as a preliminary concept.
The image of Witkacy’s Fright has been replaced on my screen by
pages of nascent notes, abandoned sentences, rich quotes and endless open tabs.
The one has been splintered by the many. Experience, as Gillies’ work in the
mirror demonstrates, is clouded by too faithful an account.
[i] Witkacy to Malinowski, in John Gillies,
Witkacy & Malinowski: a cinematic
séance in 23 scenes, (2015 - 2017), 40 min film, 5.1 or stereo
sound/installation 300 x 500mm with video projection, 5.1 sound. Quoting 622 Falls of Bungo, or the Demonic Woman
(622 Upadki Bunga, cyzli demoniczna kobieta, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz,
1910 -11)
[ii] Paulina Schlosser, “An Alternative
Biography of Witkacy”,
http://culture.pl/en/article/an-alternative-biography-of-witkacy, Sep 16, 2013.
[iii] John Conomos,
“A Video that Questions the Primacy of Narrative”, Strangers in Paradise, catalogue,
National Museum of Contemporary
Art, Korea, Seoul, 1992, 34.
[iv] L Warren, Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century
Photography, Routledge; 1 edition (November 15, 2005), 2005, 1696.
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