In conversation with Kamila Wielebska by Kamila Wielebska
30.08.2009

What games do people play?
Good question! And it seems the need to deepen our understanding of this issue keeps on growing...
This would mean the growth of consciousness of the role of self-awareness in our lives...
Self-awareness if really important. Without it we keep on going in circles, tangled up in the same games and schematic relationships.
Published in 1964 the book by psychiatrist Eric Berne Games people play is quite well known. But we should not forget The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life issued a while before by the sociologist Erving Goffman.
Yes, of course. There are more and more works which attempt to study in a more or less professional and intriguing way these mutual interrelations and interdependencies in which we become embroiled, and all those comedies or farces which we co-create every day, wittingly, half-wittingly or unwittingly. I've even seen a book recently in which the author exposed the mechanisms used by the canny manipulators, but at the same time, quite cynically and with no small dose of moral relativity, showed how to be effective at... manipulating such people. His offering in not so much a „handbook of good living” but a „handbook of non-compromising efficiency”. It may of course seem greatly tempting, but such actions do not carry anything good in the long-term, they merely release the destructive schemata. Only through honest and fair work on one's consciousness it is possible to reach autonomy and contacts free of games.
Games and decorations. Whence the title?
Hmm... It just cropped up and immediately created a whole load of connotations... an avalanche of associations (laughs).
But don't you think this could also be perceived through the context of a childhood spent backstage at the theatre?
Oh yes. That's interesting… I haven't thought about that before. Thank you for making me realise this.


Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, The Multiple Portrait, ca. 1916, St Petersburg,
from the collection of Stefan Okołowicz and by his courtesy.

Why did you put that picture of Witkacy here? The Multiple Portrait done in St Petersburg around 1916(1). Witkacy – Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, a Polish nobleman, and in the situation of the nation's non-existence the subject of the tsar was, during World War I and the October Revolution an officer of one of the most elite troops in the tsar's army.
Yes. That uniform is not just a costume worn for the photo-shoot. In 1914 aged not more than thirty Witkacy travelled through Australia to New Guinea, taking part in an expedition organised by Bronisław Malinowski. The latter, being the most important 20th century anthropologist, revolutionised the domain by replacing the usual work in the dusty museum, archive and library with the empirical field research he undertook among isolated communities. It was there, halfway across the world, that these two friends (who would call each other “the Zaratustra of the poor and the small-town Demiurge” and a “philistine, a tango-dancing career guy”) learned about the outbreak of the first World War. Malinowski decided to stay, Witkiewicz went, as he said – „Pour la défense de la Pologne”(2). But the reasons for this Witkacy's decision to enlist in the tsarist army can also be seen as one more game that boys play…
It is something that Mieczysław Porębski, a Polish art historian and critic mentions. Witkacy’s father was of the opposite political persuasion and he believed in the Piłsudski Legions created along the Austrian army, so as Porębski writes “it would be difficult not to see this move as well as a gesture of a childish, filial contrariness” (3).
Well, yes, if one is stuck permanently in the familial triangle of interdependencies and does things – albeit usually unconsciously – just to oppose mamma or papa, to prove that we can play the game of our own lives better than they, then one has no chance of ever escaping this accursed circle of entanglements.
That situation is a paradox.
Deep down it seems rather logical. The more we try to free ourselves of the coasted machine replicating the situations of dependency, the more we get caught in its cogs, because we are enclosed in the form we are trying to reject, but which gets stuck to us tighter and tighter, even though it is not us. We cannot step off that path as long as we are moving in the same direction and the only thing that changes are the vector heads... But there are increasingly more and more signs that the world is not limited to the stuffy, confined familial-marital scene, where we are bound to take up the same roles over and over again and perform some worn pieces. Life seems to have a lot more to offer and there are ways to escape the racks and pinions, to obtain “a friendly divorce from one's parents” (4), as Berne puts it, or to find within oneself the “a non-oedipal unconscious which is in no way pre-oedipal” (5), as Pierre Péju writes in The Girl from the Chartreuse.
It is an amazing book. Its Polish subtitle reads For the poetics of fairy tale: in response to psychoanalytic and formalist interpretations. Peju is trying to snatch the fairy tale away (and with it something more as well) from the thrall of the unequivocal interpretations of the psychoanalysts.
We read in it: “In fairy tale we find images which testify to a pre-individual, non-anthropomorphic unconscious, wild and mechanic. There are desires in us which cannot be called anything else than a will to be <>, to become a tree or a stone, a frog or a rat..., and which have nothing to do with that or another phase of the libido; and the desire to be <> has nothing to do with an imagination of being all-powerful. The essence of that other life of the unconscious is the escape, which is not an escape from anything or any-one: it is but a pure escape from the behaviours of a human being, social and family roles, a strict division of species and genres. [...] At the centre of many fairy tales there is a trap, a hole, the black cavity of the belly – through which one can descend onto this, which has nothing to do with Oedipus, society, family... The entry into the woods, through which the wind, the wolf, the ogre, or other forces of nature escape to come at us. Luckily for girls, luckily for everyone, fairy tales are only a lesson in accepting ones fate, or of accepting initiation, they are rather a presentation. Fairy tales bring us images of being lost. And those who listen to them or tell them, would better play with those images, or ponder them, or dream or make a choice”(6).
But let us get back to Witkacy and his Multiple portrait in the mirrors. In 1917 Duchamp also made one of those of himself. I have also recently seen a picture of Ryszard Stanisławski, the legendary director of the Łódź Museum of Art, done in the same manner... These are all masculine images. I thought about those in the context of the Multifold (fourfold) portrait, a sculpture by Alina Szapocznikow, showing a multiplied fragment of an eyeless face, and of the Multiple Portrait of Alina Szapocznikow, a book by Agata Jakubowska.
It is a fundamental difference, whether it is a woman’s or a man’s portrait…
You think so?
It is not important what I think. What matters is, how others perceive it (laughs). The idea of male individualism has a long tradition in the Euro-American culture. A Multiple portrait referring to that particular tradition – including, as it seems a direct reference to the picture of Witkacy we are interested in here – was also done about ten years ago by a Polish artist Barbara Konopka. But this is a consciously critical (perhaps even iconoclastic?) toying with the convention. Because according to the widely accepted standards – or at least it is so in the Polish cultural fuddy-duddy – women have completely different roles to play then men. See this for example: “She desires [Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun] to charm us with her person, she uses her painting as one more charm.” Elisabeth [Vigée-Lebrun] and Angelica [Kauffman] were very different in their dispositions, but both were greatly enamoured with themselves, both had a narcissistic attitude to their appearance and many a time painted themselves”(7). And compare it with another passage from the same book, on a similar subject: “By looking at his features and the shapes of his body the individual attempts to reach deeper into his own soul. Especially after the tempestuous period of adolescence a young man will look with anxiety and fear into his own features, to read who he is out of them. He looks in the mirror, looking for answers to the vexed question �who are you?�”(8).
Interesting. What is it?
Mieczysław Wallis Self-portrait [Autroportret].
It would seem then, that women are just not capable of deeper reflection.
It would, I suppose, although the book is quite dated, published in 1964, so perhaps women have been able to learn something since then. This for example, that if you write for a living you should remember this simple rule: you should be quoting a lot from men, best to use ones who are old and acknowledged or young and ambitious, or ones who are dead... or at the very least your contemporaries. If you fail to do this there’s a very small chance for what you do to be seen as valuable. You silly girl...
Hmm... Although it seems that both Witkacy and Duchamp were equally interested in toying with convention. That which they have in common is undoubtedly the love of mystification and an ironic (if differently pitched) sense of humour, as well as those leanings to compromise the accepted boundaries of art...
Yes. You could say that they both somehow fit the convention of an “Avant-garde Artist”. In one of his older books Piotr Piotrowski points to the pessimism of Witkacy related to the achievements of “contemporary civilisation” as a factor that places him in counterpoint to the forward-looking hopefulness of avant-garde artists praising the degradation of the past (9). But I would say that this aversion to tradition of those avant-garde artists wanting to create a “new” future ended where their intimate affairs were concerned. And I needn’t add how infrequently women were cast in the avant-garde role.
Too true. Barbara Konopka’s work however, fits perfectly into the convention of feminist art taking up a playful stance towards the dictate of a clearly defined (and image-ined) identity. But this game was also known to Witkacy, who would enact different personae in his photographs, designating himself multiple pseudonyms, often invented on the spot for the purpose – such as Marceli Duchański-Blaga(10), the name itself alludes to Marcel Duchamp – and collaborating with non-existent collaborators. Stefan Okołowicz called his actions the “theatre of life” (11). Around this time, in Paris, such multiple „incarnations” were quite similarly enacted in her self-portraits by Claude Cahun...
...And it seems that as a woman eluding the control and definition of the masculine eye and denouncing the role of a muse, she had a much tougher convention to break.
And what about Rrose Sélavy? Letting oneself be photographed in women’s dress in the 1920s would have been scandalous even in Paris. In pre-war Poland it would have been unthinkable...
Well yes, Polish culture is quite restrictive on that point up until today, and the only concession made was for the conspirators who fought against the occupant and who would smuggle illegal print material in the folds of their dresses.
Witkacy is also a somewhat tragic character. And it is not so much to do with the dramatic events that he witnessed and which were the rock of his catastrophic vision of the decline of European culture. By irritating the “audience” and fuelling the atmosphere of scandal surrounding him, he was also complaining about the lack of serious treatment of his oeuvre. Though perhaps he sentenced himself to this fate, remaining in an environment which was unable to respond to his actions in a constructive way and where no impulse could have been a true intellectual stimulus to him.
So we have the male multiple portraits as executed by the artists (Stanisławski’s one is but a clear expression of narcissist vanity), Witkacy and Duchamp. In the album Against Nothingness [Przeciw Nicości] presenting photographs by the former I found a note on a few more examples of similar photographs and an information that the way to achieve this trick was described in great detail by Albert A. Hopkins in a book entitled Magic, published in New York in 1897...(12).
The Victorian Era... (laughs). You know, when I look at that photograph in which one face is looking at a few more faces identical with it, I think of another magic motif, the Threefold Law: “Three times what thou givest returns to thee”.
In the space of an individual life everything that happens to us and all that we do with it for ourselves, and that which we then send out into the world, is visible on our faces, it sculpts it and moulds it. And since the eyes are always the most important, there is no mask which we could wear that could truly and efficiently deceive anyone. A supremely superficial person that Oscar Wilde, the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray, was would know it.
So we should really be saying that everything is written in the eyes, not on our faces. Eyes cannot be hidden under a mask. That is why people who are not being fair and have “something to hide” are trying not to look you in the eye as they talk. It’s also “in their eyes” if someone is a happy person.
In 1925 Witkacy decided to end his work as a painter and instead he set up the Portrait Company “S.I. Witkiewicz”. As part of this enterprise (run with imaginary collaborators) he would make commercial portraits, made to order, and he set the precise rules of this venture in a specially written set of Regulations.
It is interesting that around the same time (1923) having delivered his The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or the mysterious Large Glass, Marcel Duchamp also decided to fold – at least officially – his more traditionally understood artistic work, and from then on devoted himself to playing chess. And with good results too, as in 1925 the French Chess Federation granted him the title of a Master, and he would take place in the chess Olympics. Chess-playing cannot be commercialized the way art is. Duchamp actually thought that chess-players are artists (though not all artists are chess-players, of course). André Breton was to say of him that in everything he did he was playing his perpetual game of chess.
Yes, Porębski writes of the differences and similarities of the attitudes of Witkacy and Duchamp (13).
I could also add that both died in the same year, 1968.
I think you got it all wrong... It is a well known fact that Witkacy died on the 18th of September 1939 in Jeziora, which are now part of Ukraine. Together with his lover and muse Czesława Oknińska, who they actually manager to resuscitate, he committed suicide upon hearing that the Red Army entered the Polish territory... We’re celebrating the 70th anniversary of it now!
We are... (laughs). That’s a good one. What you just described is just a scenario of another mystification by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Dazed from the Veronal they had taken Okińska was not a convincing witness, she kept changing her story, she hasn’t seen the corpse. In 1988 the authorities decided to transport his remains to Poland and give him a ceremonial burial, but when the coffin was opened upon the exhumation in 1994, the corpse turned out to be – as the official report states – the remains of a “young woman of 25-30 years of age, around 164 cm tall.” After the war someone had picked up a set of dentures he ordered in Warsaw back in 1939 and in the 1950s Witkacy started sending postcards... Although he apparently created such ante-dated postcards which he gave to his friends and ordered them to send those at a precise moment, for example in 2000 something... An alternative scenario claims that Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz died in 1968 in Łódź. That was when Czesława Oknińska Stoppel buying his favourite beer. Witkacy was apparently hiding in her apartment, playing a game with the PRL's [People’s Republic of Poland] communist agents looking for him. More light will be certainly shed on the issue by Jacek Koprowicz’s latest film Mystification [Mistyfikacja](14).
You always know how to surprise me. Since we are talking about Witkacy and Duchamp, we cannot forget Wittgenstein, their contemporary, who, as an Austrian, spent some time in army service in Kraków during World War I. In 1918 having finished the Tractatus, which he began writing in the trenches of the war, he gave up philosophy, to which he returned rather suddenly in 1928 to turn in his Investigations to ‘language-games’, the term, which “is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a life form"(15). There is in that motif of escape, of sudden disappearance, of relinquishing an idea something truly star-like, something that is easily forgotten in Polish culture, in all its martyrdom, where disappearance is associated unequivocally with some kind of exclusion, albeit voluntary, or it denotes a defeat. Meanwhile, in order to be famous, all one needs to do is to perform a disappearing act at the right moment, as evidenced by “close encounters of a third degree” with Jim Morrison, Elvis, or even Andy Warhol... Michael Jackson has not been this popular for a long time. You know, I was thinking about that film we’ve seen recently...
I'm not there by Todd Haynes, which never got distributed in Poland, so it is not really known here. Haynes’ film was announced as „inspired by true, real, imagined, exaggerated stories of the greatest artist, agitator, poet, fighter of our time” Bob Dylan, a man who is still alive; it does not present a unified vision, doesn’t attempt to create a definite and compact, concise picture. It is rather a loose, flexible improvisation showing the different aspects of Dylan’s personality, or rather snapshots from the lives of six dynamic personalities of which each could (perhaps) be Dylan, as played by six Hollywood stars Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Ger, Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin.
Right, let’s get back to the games that people play. Don’t you think that participating in them is ultimately somehow tempting?
Well, apart from the toxicity of them, which kills all spontaneous reactions and relations there is something even more depressing about those. When you see all too clearly that others are trying to get you involved in their games as a naïve actor-spectator... When you see it so clearly it really stops being fun and becomes rather tiresome and irritating... Sometimes looking at the human condition in this way is simply sad.
Berne ends his book with those words: „This may mean that there is no hope for the human race, but there is hope for individual members of it”(16). But shouldn’t the question of communication with other people be of supreme importance?
I think that equally important, or perhaps even basic, is the ability to communicate with oneself. Most people neglect it to such a degree, dozing themselves in any which way, effectively preventing this internal contact. This creates many problems, complexes, frustrations, neuroses, irritating ambitions, which from time to time give an irrational itch... The cultivation of this weed, instead of careful tending to the garden of consciousness causes unpredictable losses in the simplest of human relations. Sometimes it’s better to keep away from all of this. It saves a lot of nerves. An honest conversation with one self... if only everyone would practice it. Anyway... maybe it’s just an illusion. Not everyone’s intentions are good, really?

Your silence, is that an answer to my question? In the Euro-American culture silence is not a satisfactory answer. The tradition of overblown egos and dominating individualism treats such a stance as undeserving, it takes it as a passive sign of weakness. Western science is trying to find answers to all the questions that crop up in its own head. In the name of finding breeding room for its ever-growing ego it won’t even leave the defenceless isolates alone...
You know... I’m thinking about Wittgenstein. When he returned to philosophy, in his Investigations he clearly realised his earlier postulate which concluded the Tractatus, leaving some issues to silence. Out of 784 questions he only answered 110, the majority of them purposefully wrong.
Wittgenstein treated his considerations as a form of therapy, which would be meant to cure us of the propensity to philosophise. I, on the other hand, thought of the prince Siddharta, who at the age of twenty and nine came out of his palace for the first time, and what he saw made him abandon the palace, his family and his royal duties in secret and go on a search…
Amazing, you have mentioned that. My last read was a book-conversation which was a result of the meeting between Jean-Claude Carrière, a journalist and screenwriter, who cooperated, among others, with Luis Buñuel, with the Dalai Lama. We read in it: „No trace of substance is present in us unchanged. We live in an unceasing stream of interconnectedness, which at every moment condition our existence. We have no way of talking about our <>, of our being. The Buddhists cannot follow Descartres’ sentence. Nothing entitles us to moving from thinking to being; both are elements of the same current of change. Instead of saying <> we can only say at the moment of saying <> or rather as Nietzsche said <>”(17).
Yes. The Buddha would undermine his own authority, recommending confidence in the teaching, and not the teacher. And some questions he replied to with silence, as they cannot be explored by the mind, and they are known as the “fourteen unanswerable questions”. In Carrière's book, what is also valuable is the recalling of the motif of the connection between the teachings of the Enlightened One and surrealism. In April of 1925 in the third issue of the "Révolution surréaliste" was printed Antonin Artaud's text entitled Address to the Dalai Lama, in which he writes: “It is inwardly that I am like you: I, dust, idea, lip, levitation, dream, cry, renunciation of idea, suspended among all the forms and hoping for nothing but the wind.”(18).
The conversation between Jean-Claude Carrière and the Dalai Lama raises sometimes the association with Wittgenstein’s considerations. The fragment, which concerns the emptiness (Sunyata) reminds me of the late essay On certainty, in which he is referring to the propositions of George Edward Moore. The concept of the emptiness is, next to the impermanence, no- ego, and suffering one of the basic ideas of Buddhism. As the Buddha said: “Form is emptiness and emptiness is form”.

“But first we have to state clearly that <> is not <>. Some commentators have unjustly accused Buddhism of being nihilist. The world, of which we are part is neither a being in itself nor a sum of beings. It is in flux. A stream of states. Which means it is not nothing.
To say <> doesn’t mean <>.
Never. It also means that all things are dependent on other things. Nothing exist by itself. Besides, I believe that on this science is going pretty much the same way we are.
I believe so too. It places the emphasis on the relations between phenomena, than on the phenomena themselves.
We sat that things exposed to all kinds of influence appear, exist and cease. Incessantly.
In constant flux.
But they never exist in and by themselves. For example this hand... [...] It seems durable and coherent. To the perceiver it seems a defined form. It has all the externals of unity. [...] But if we think about it deeply, what is my arm anyway? Is it a finger? No, I can only say that a finger is a finger, not an arm. Further, is it the bones? No, because I could <> into bones and study, look and name only each of those individually.
Why would be stop at the bones anyway?
Right! I can go deep into the matter that is there, but I would never really find my hand.
But you are using your hand.
That is what it is there for. And I am very pleased with it. This combination of different elements, which can each be taken apart and which are all interconnected we call a hand. It is simple. This is what we call it as a result of a thought process, which we are used to. This is what we call reality.
Which is dependent on elements different from itself?
Correct. Because nothing happens without a cause. The deep nature of this hand is its dependency on a whole network of influences, of which none is permanent.
That is why one day this hand would stop being your hand.
It would have been mine for a very short period in comparison with the age of the world. For a fleeting, almost unrecognizable moment. We are all certain that we live independently one of the other, that this had, this piece of paper, have separate existences.
Our mind needs to separate and name. It cannot accept a complex and undetermined vision of the world.
But we ought to be accepted, and attempt to understand this complex vision. Without it we will remain in the state of illusion. If every living being, every object had an independent existence, no factor could influence them. […].
And it is this absence of independent existence that you call <>?
Yes, exactly. Form is therefore <>, meaning unseparated, it does not exist independently. It is relative.
Why does emptiness have a form?
Because every form develops in this emptiness, where there is no independent existence. The emptiness exists only to lead to form. It cannot be otherwise. Emptiness without form would not make sense. In that sense, a piece of paper is empty. Empty, which means full. Full of the entire universe”(19).

English translation: Aleksandra Walentynowicz

Notes:

(1) See: http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?07PLAAAA02324857
(2) A letter from A. Jałowiecka to Witkacy’s mother dated 13 Feb 1915. [In:] Witkiewicz Listy do syna [Letters to son], p. 640-641 (Aneks), after: p. 203.
(3) M. Porębski, Miejsce Witkacego, [in:] Interregnum. Studia z historii sztuki XIX i XX wieku, Kraków 1979, s. 203.
(4) E. Berne, W co grają ludzie. Psychologia stosunków międzyludzkich, Warsaw 1997, p. 154. [English edition: E. Berne Games People Play. The Psychology of Human Relationships, New York: Ballantine Books 1964].
(5) P. Péju, Dziewczynka w baśniowym lesie. O poetykę baśni: w odpowiedzi na interpretacje psychoanalityczne i formalistyczne, Warszawa 2008, p.86. [Translation own. Published in English as The Girl from the Chartreuse, London: Random House 2007].
(6) Ibidem, pp. 86, 129 [Polish edition].
(7) M. Wallis, Autoportret [Self-portrait], Warsaw 1964 , p.79, [translation own].
(8) Ibidem, p.16.
(9) See: P. Piotrowski, Metafizyka obrazu [The Metaphysics of the Picture. On the Art Theory and Artistic Attitude of S.I.Witkiewicz], Poznań: Adam Mickiewicz University Press, 1985, pp. 100-125.
(10) Blaga means Humbug.
(11) S. Okołowicz, Against Nothingness [Przeciw Nicości], [in:] E. Franczak, S. Okołowicz, Against Nothingness. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's photographs [Przeciw Nicości. Fotografie Stanisława Ignacego Witkiewicza], Kraków 1986, p. 22.
(12) E. Franczak, S. Okołowicz, op. cit., pp. 26, 63.
(13) M. Porębski, op. cit.
(12) At present the photos from the set, the screenplay and a video interview with the director can be seen in CoCA Toruń at the Gone to Croatan [Poszliśmy do Croatan] exhibition, 19.06.-27.09.09, curators: R. Rumas, D. Muzyczuk.
(15) L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Wiley-Blackwell 3 edition, 1991, �23.
Available here: http://books.google.pl/books?id=JoPYriJM1cwC&lpg=PA62-IA1&ots=5uCKMUBbb-&dq=ludwig%20wittgenstein%20c%2B%20investigations&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
(16) E. Berne, op. cit., p.155 [Polish edition].
(17) H.H. the Dalai Lama and J.-C. Carrière, Siła buddyzmu, Warsaw 1998, p. 53 [translation own. Published in English as The Power of Buddhism, Newleaf 1996)].
(18) A. Artaud, Address to the Dalai Lama, transl. D. Rattray, available here: http://books.google.pl/books?id=5RdQ-2uiTFIC&lpg=PA64&ots=Xgv3GeCWP1&dq=Address%20to%20the%20Dalai%20Lama%2BArtaud&pg=PA65#v=onepage&q=&f=false
(19) H.H. the Dalai Lama and J.-C. Carrière, op. cit., p.178-180 [Polish edition].