In conversation with Przemysław Sanecki by Adam Andrzej Fuss
31.08.2009

Do you think anyone can be an artist?
I remember when I was in high school, I asked myself, what makes people tick if they're not interested in art? Their lives seemed so insipid. If I went on thinking like that, I would answer by saying that becoming an artist is solely an act of will. But today my attitude is characterised by contradictions. I believe that saying that anyone could be an artist is some kind of professional hypocrisy. It's as if my doctor told me anyone could be their own doctor, then gave me a pile of blank prescriptions and told me to fix my own therapy. On the other hand, I feel a deep need to initiate such events as Kill all white people or, in particular the Drop point at the CCA Łaźnia, where the authorship is vague, or more precisely ceded to those present at the gallery.


Drop point, CCA Łaźnia, Gdańsk, 2009, photo Anna Szynwelska

The drive to fame has become universal. Do you think it a good drive(r) for creation?
That is hardly a new thing for artists to want to be famous, its almost inscribed into the ethos, but what fame are we talking about? I meet people who are not professionally linked to art everyday and not many of them know who Wilhelm Sasnal is. Fame in art has a very limited range in Poland. Communism in art ended almost two decades after '89. For the past few years the situation has changed significantly. When I was studying, everyone knew there was the art market, but how it linked to life after art school was hard to fathom. So I think that when young artists think about fame, they mean to be noticed by some Warsaw gallery, so that they won't have to work as a computer graphic designer. I think that doesn't particularly deserve deeper reflection. It is more of an obvious attitude resulting from the economic environment. And it is justified – artists ought to have means.

You coined the term 'performism'. Performance is an art that seems most difficult to define.
Performism owes to performance only the first part of its coinage. It is a negative definition of art by pointing to activities, which do not belong to the autonomy of art, which are external or exist as overt or covert rules. Performism is not about art, but about its boundaries, within which the artist and people connected to art move. Putting it briefly, performism is everything that constitutes the artist and work of art in the social game. Why does performism stem from performance? Performance is a performism in microscale, its truest homology. Mainly through the dissolution of definition. Its boundaries always seemed rather blurred – at what moment and to what moment are we dealing with a performance? If we look more closely, we realise there is no such thing, or rather there is none in performance itself.

What made you do performance art, which is in itself ephemeral? Doesn't documenting such art stand in contradiction to its character?
I started doing performance even before artschool and then carried on throughout. Though I would like to stress that this activity was completely unrelated to my studies. It would have been just as good if I went to study something else entirely. Anything... When performance was most important to me, I did not think about documentation. Documentation is documentation, performance is performance. These are two separate genres in art, so I do not see a contradiction.

What is your vision of the future of performative practices in Poland?
In my definition performance is an abuse of the artist's position in relation to others. That is of course my personal definition for now, closely bound to me as an artist, for whom doing performance is becoming more and more difficult and is a measure of my development not only as an artist, but as a human being. Doing art can be ethically ambiguous, because of, among other things, the entire apparatus of symbolic coercion. And in performance, in a situation of direct responsibility? Well, you get it. It's an awkward situation. That is why sometime ago I stopped using props, behaving aggressively or disappearing. So as to overcome the passive acceptance of symbolic violence through provocation and to give people back the naturalness of their behaviours, even for the price of being classified a mentally unstable individual. I think that performance hasn't got anything better to pass on than the „using of self to be here and now”... Why am I saying all this? Let's just say, I'm deeply attached to this attitude towards performance and if I were to be consistent in it, I would see the role of the performer as someone akin to a public officer protecting against the abuses of art. That somehow seems not to be a worry to those who are currently dealing with performance in Poland. Where others see performance I see, more or less, theatre, overexpression. That type of art is alien to me. Those actions through which someone is trying to prove that their experience of the world is the most important.

Do your actions have any convergence points with theatre?
No, not really. I am against theatre in performance. The less theatrical gestures there are, the less props, the better. As for theatre itself, it seems to me I do not understand it, meaning, I do not believe it to be what I think it is. Too many intelligent people are connected to it for it to be as idiotic as it appears to be to me.

Which performance artists are your inspiration?
None of them was strictly a performer and not all of them even did performance. In conceptualism above all Dan Graham, Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, Sol LeWitt. They're a whole range, but all of them connected by the fact that they treated art as a field of experimentation.

Does tradition matter?
Art in general, as a participation in a particular tradition. I could name artists of all times, but that doesn't make sense. Instead, something more interesting occurred to me. In 1999 I had my debut at the Entropia Gallery in Wrocław. It was before my studies and I have a lot of respect for Mariusz Jodko and the entire gallery team for the support they gave me. As though I had a premonition that it would not be so obvious with me I decided to call what I did not performance but appearance. Besides, to be perfectly honest, all I did was have a deep nap. Some weeks later I got a very nice letter from Przemysław Kwiek, with a lot of artistic 'propaganda', amongst other things the theoretical explication of appearance. I had no idea that someone before me called what I did same as I did and, frankly speaking, I did not care then and do not care now. If I would have had to invent performance I probably would have. This is what happens with powerful creativity. You create a new definition of art every time, this is prerequisite for an artistic act to be creative. No cash&carry...

Can your work be subsumed under one specific idea?
Not an idea, rather an aesthetic stance, though I often think it more of an exploratory or ethical stance.

So what is creativity to you – a kind of medicine, a sedative?
If I were to define it in such categories, I would say it is a medicine in the sense that Wittgenstein wrote about his philosophy – that it is a cure for philosophy.

Did you ever doubt what you were doing?
Of course, doubts are what keeps pushing me ahead, but to take the smallest step one needs certainty or arrogance even.

Were there any works that were good in theory, but the execution ruined the idea?
„Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution”i. And the other way round. I do not separate these.

Is conceptualism only an artistic strategy, or a way of thinking about life, the world?
I call up conceptualism, the objects that are its legacy for entirely different reasons. I need a reference point, for myself, for practical reasons, but mostly for others. We need to be able to talk.

Can you tell a breaking point in your activities, which would denote the beginning of conceptual activity?
I'm not sure there would be one such moment. Art cannot be explained. I guess realising this ignorance could have been such a moment. It is a kind of obstinacy, the drive to solving that problem. That is why I say that art can be a cognitive tool. Even though the knowledge you gain is in effect negative knowledge. You keep on not knowing. And there is no guarantee it would ever be any different. But this is addictive, tastes like a drug. I came upon art, others have other problems. From time to time I meet people with an equally strong passion and that inspires me. I feel I have a lot in common with them. That proves that art is just a particular instance, one of the many outlets of an energy common to us all.


Drop point, CCA Łaźnia, Gdańsk, 2009, photo Anna Szynwelska

When you work, do you try to forget things you did before, or are you thinking about continuity?
I do not think about them, nor do I forget them. Art is a process and you are not always aware of its continuity. What is important to me is the connection between some of my works, like the Łódź Manhattan Gallery, where I transgressed the bodily inviolability of the spectators by falling on them, with the Drop point in Gdańsk's Łaźnia. If you were to put it sociologically, you would see that both are borderline of what a spectator expects of a situation in the space of art. What I have been doing for a while is placing the responsibility for art on others. It is those „others” who decided that a quasi scientific experiment would become a metaphor and aggression at the gallery was not the same as it would have been in any other public place. The context of the place does not solve it all, it is also down to the people. So I examine myself this way, looking for the common thread, my narrative of art, though maybe I would liken it to handwriting and a graphologist's efforts.

Do you see the practice of visual arts as a form of research tool?
More and more it seems to me that art is not something timeless, but an ability to commune with the world.

Do you live of your art?
Art is a way of experiencing the world, so I can say I am living art. This has become so strong a habit, it cannot be otherwise. However it is not the attitude of an extremist. If it were otherwise many of my acquaintances or friendships would not have been possible.

Can you transform the world through art?
Any activity in the world leaves a trace and art is no exception. But if someone would like to transform the world, I would advise them to do something else than art. Economy perhaps, politics, working for an NGO, charity, ecology, religion... Today doing art is just one of many lifestyles, at the service of other lifestyles it seems. There is no internal justification for me to persuade someone they ought to be an artist, that this would be better for the world. All I can do is act freely, inspiring others by my way of life. I am expecting much the same of others.

Who is the audience of your art?
Félix Gonzalez-Torres would always ask his students „Who is your audience?”. That is key. At first you are by yourself, but we are so much alike, that there can be some form of understanding between us or at least an illusion of it. So I can say that my audience is that which is common and at the same time intimate. But it is a particular kind of intimacy, having nothing to do with the sphere of shame, rather, which may sound odd, a kind of intimate understanding.

Do you care about the relationships between the artworld and politics?
If art institutions are financed from public means, then art is politics. What else is an exhibition at a public institution if not a subtle form of appropriation of common space? To have an exhibition is an artistic success because it is first a political success. That is what performism is, which is not difficult as a general idea, but much more so if you would like to observe the practices of individual artists. The exhibition politics are being financed out of taxpayers' money, so it comes as no surprise such a high premium is being put on masking mechanisms. It looks rather common up close.

What would you like to come back to earth as?
If I had a choice I'd rather not come back here.

February 2009


English translation: Aleksandra Walentynowicz


Note:
(1) Sol LeWitt, Sentences on Conceptual Art, “Art-Language. The Journal of Conceptual Art”. Volume 1, Number 1. May 1969.



Drop Point – the science and art in an experiment

When planning it I wanted to make clear the following message: 'you are not going to a gallery with nothing, if you want to have art, you have to do something, you have to discharge it, drop it'. It didn't concern blurring collectivization. Despite the undeniable fact that this work was performed with the participation of 25 people, it was not an anonymous activity. I had to prevail on them to go inside. I do not know what they have taken out of it, but I am convinced that things multiply when shared.

*

Drop Point is an experiment-performance during which heat exchange between human organism and its environment was used. The experiment combined art and science. Both for a scientist and for an artist the aim was to perform air condensation in a space surrounded by a group of people. Whereas the scientist conducted it in order to measure the intensity of the phenomenon, the artist's aim was to initiate a deeper reflection on the sense of community.

In the experiment a simple small garden tent construction covered with thin foil was used . This experiment station was called – DISTILLER. The experiment took place in the Centre for Contemporary Art Łaźnia in Gdańsk and involved a group of 25 people of both sexes aged 19 to 50. I cooperated with Adam Krzysztofiak from Wrocław University of Technology.

The following factors/parameters were measured:
– the temperature outside the DISTILLER
– the temperature inside the DISTILLER
– relative air humidity outside the DISTILLER
– relative air humidity inside the DISTILLER

The measurements were taken every 2 minutes. After 20 minutes from the beginning the experiment climaxed – dew conspicuously appeared on all walls of the Distiller. The temperature during the experiment rose by 6.5 Celsius degrees, the relative humidity by 43%.

The experiment with the participation of 25 people lasted only 20 minutes. It clearly shows how intense the release of latent heat is and how serious this problem could be in a lot of buildings. Especially, as the results of comprehensive research show, the deterioration of temperature conditions in a given room has a considerable impact on the effectiveness of people's work.

English translation: Kamila Wielebska
Proof-read by Ola Hołubowicz