Monika Weiss: Between Presence and Performative Memory

by

Aneta Szyłak

Published in PANOPTIKUM Audiovizualia film media sztuka 4 (11) /2005, Akademickie Centrum Kultury Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego

Aneta Szyłak:

I would like to introduce to you Monika Weiss, Polish artist working and living in New York. Today's presentation marks the beginning of our collaboration. I'm interested especially in her video works which document her performances but also function as independent works of art. Monika Weiss combines traditional forms of expression such as drawing. with installation, video and performance. Her intermedia work refers to the relationships between the space and the body of the artist.

As a curator I'm interested in characteristic motifs re-occuring in your art. Such recognizable form is your own body, often curled up in an embryonal position. This motif appears also in your drawings. Could you tell us a little bit more about this motif?

Monika Weiss:

The position of being curled up signifies vulnerability. It defines the moment of becoming, a state between being and not being. The boundary between presence and absence is fluid.

AS

Another frequent motif in your works is the act of drawing around your body, the marking of the terrain. You repeat your movements in a way that is almost obsessive and, at the same time, ritualistic. Your actions take long time, often many hours, sometimes days. It is a certain state of body and mind. What is your relationship with the world outside of your body, specifically during the performance?

MW
During my actions my eyes are closed. I draw with both of my hands, at the same time, questioning the control of the eye and the control of one singular hand. I am in a state of maximal concentration. My actions result from what I feel as the necessity to create an image, which gradually comes to life, as a result of my action. The image becomes visible through the lens of the camera suspended from the ceiling. The sound seems to gradually get louder, as if cutting through my body. To some extent, this physicality of sound inspired me to require silence from others. Silence allows for a complete focus; we become witnesses to the presence of our bodies. The requirement of silence appears in traditional performance of classical music. A similar requirement of complete silence appears in sacred temples, as a form of respect.

AS
Presence is experienced much more intensely, when we are silent. We have to concentrate on the presence of a person who is near us. This is a difficult kind of action, because the viewer is not sure whether they should look or not. During the performance by Tanja Ostojic - similarly, like in your own work in the pieces where you are naked inside your sculptures - the artist was inhabiting a very small space of an elevator. Viewers entered into the elevator and were faced with this close proximity to the naked artist, which was contrary to the traditional theatre, which traditionally offers a safe distance. Simply speaking, they couldn't look at her.

MW

I am interested in such intimacy and closeness. On the other hand, I'm also trying to imply distance and absence. In many of my works I'm no longer there. Perhaps I was there before, returning in intervals of time. There are traces which appear in a form of virtual projection or sonic presence, also drawing traces, marks and stains.

Audience

What is time to you?

MW

In my most recent project with fire and books, Phlegethon-Milczenie, there is the time of my presence inside of my sculpture. Viewers bend towards my curled up body. They take books into their hands. The books were published before the Second World War so there is also the time of when they were written and the time of the hands which touched them over the years, and the time of the many burnings of the books. The video functions here as an independent composition and it contains a different type of time: eternal time, returning time.

AS

You draw the space, around the space. You form the space from the open books, or your marking of it with an empty canvas or paper, or another material. The space becomes a site of your action just like your chalice sculpture, which also functions as a kind of confining space.

MW

I'm interested in limitations and in establishing compositional rules. In that context, a make a plan so that I know that, for example, I will be crawling with my eyes closed while drawing around my body. I know that the project will take a couple of days. I compose the sound as specific to the location. Later, I encounter the element of unpredictability. I open the boundaries of the drawing or the sculpture towards the unknown - because only now being known - form. In my series Vessels there are the objects, which physically embrace my curled up figure. My cycle of works Intervals are public spaces of drawing, open to others, who can literally enter the work. These landscapes of drawing can also be subjected to changes caused by the natural phenomena, as such as rain, wind or light. The limitation in this case is expressed by delineating duration and site, akin to an interval in music, which is the distance between two notes; in music this interval is necessary to achieve a specific sound or harmony.

AS

Your actions require physical effort, often take long periods of time, or take place in extremely limited spaces, or lower the temperature of the body. Time in your art is not linear. Rather, it is subjective. It is the time that you live through. When you are immersed inside of the chalice, you cease to feel the time passing. Is it an experience of deprivation?

MW

In my projects I'm not interested in serious harming of my health or in risking my life. Instead, I offer a space of observation of the delicate, small, often very slow changes; the way we get tired, the way we get cold, the way we fall asleep, the way we grow old. From inside towards the world outside, being inside of an artistic object, surrendering to it, what happens is a quiet tiredness. There is no culmination, no conclusion. This inhabiting of the space, this process, can be more or less difficult, or perhaps painful, in longer actions. It happened to me that the gallery got closed already and everybody left but I was still doing something. I was still curled up inside the fluid. The museum workers would come and would say that I can end my action now. In the project Drawing the City (Day One, Day Two), the one with blue umbrellas, the light gradually disappeared; and this how I knew that the day was coming to an end.

AS

In your many of works we see natural phenomena, for example the motifs of river and fire. These are fundamental elements of the world, of the matter.

MW

Human skin has a lot to do with paper, water, and stone. I want to see what happens between various materials from which the world is composed, and we are only one of them. In my work Limen, I worked with very large rolls of clean newspaper. I built a meadow from hundreds of layers of paper. The element of water appeared as a recorded sound, suggesting an earlier immersion. The sound corresponded with my gradual disappearance under the layers of the paper.

AS

In your work we often see this idea of immersion, which seems to have a great importance to you. You immerse yourself in water or in paper. It is a specific state of being inside a substance.

MW
Merleau-Ponty calls the body the space between, which we have to address. The space of the body is the only and the ultimate referent that we have. The act of drawing around the body is therefore a symbolic act. Also the act of laying down on the ground, as a symbolic attempt to overcome the intellectual distance. This form of action belongs to the culture that is already after-language, functioning as an attempt to define the unnamable reality.

AS

In your German project you drew on top of the books which felt like a difficult act, especially for people raised on books, for intellectuals. We are such nation and also Germans are too, to whom you addressed your project.

MW
For this project I have burned the first edition of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. I filmed the act of burning and I recorded its sound. The higher pitch of the burning book was surprisingly different from, for example, the sound of burning wood. As you know, Thomas Mann was one of the authors whose books were burned by the Nazis. The process of burning of the book was very difficult for me as well.

Audience

Is sound the most important impulse, the first impulse and inspiration in your work?

MW

Sound often precedes all of the other elements of a project, yes. Similarly, also drawings and sketches. In the final work, sound is equal to other elements. Sound or its lack defines the space. Members of Fluxus did actions in which they would say “be silent or leave”. I like to define the space of the installation through creating a sonic environment. Similarly, I mark the space through placing the canvas down on the ground, or through the action itself.

AS

Perhaps we should talk about this dimension of your work, which we cannot see in its totality here, meaning how your work is being exhibited on a larger scale.

MW

My recent exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York [curated by Nina Colosi] presented works in two connected galleries. The concept of the exhibition assumed that all works were part of one landscape. In one of the rooms, I created a “meadow” from hundreds of layers of paper, covering most of the space of the gallery. A video camera was suspended from the ceiling, capturing my performance and it was a source of projected images. In the second room, my polypropylene sculpture filled with water was placed. Into that sculpture an image of my curled up body was projected. One could hear the sound of my whispering voice mixed with the sounds of the immersion in the water. On the walls, I hung large-scale drawings made with charcoal and with dry pigment on paper. In a recent two-person exhibition with Carolee Schneemann at Remy Toledo Gallery, I also worked with two spaces. One of the two spaces was very small. It scale suggested to me a cell, and so I walled up the window leaving only a small opening, as if it was a medieval cell or a war bunker. Through that narrow opening one could see Hudson River. The name of the work was Lethe Room. Lethe is a mythological river of oblivion. It's a place, a site, were we forget about the past. In that cell there was a sculpture made to look like a tomb, cast in cement and filled with layers of paper, which I inhabited from time to time during the exhibition.

AS

Your works can be understood as rituals of cleansing. Water and fire appear in your work as metaphors or as allegories. These are natural phenomena, which in culture often have been assigned the power of cleansing.

MW

Similar forms and symbols appear in various cultures. Immersion, baptism, opening of one’s arms in a gesture of surrender or triumph. In my project Phlegethon-Milczenie I placed dozens of small drawings between the books. The drawings were made with graphite on pages torn out of the pre-war books and notebooks. All the books in this project were open towards the light, the way the bodies in the drawings had their arms lifted upwards, legs open like flowers. In terms of sound, we heard passages from The Creation (1797), an oratorio by Joseph Haydn, however it was sang much slower in tempo, and a capella. This normally very victorious composition by Haydn was overlayed with selected phrases from melancholic, lamenting Salve Regina by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1736). Both were recorded in collaboration with opera vocalist Anthony Roth Costanzo. I later recomposed the recording to create a chorus of voices mixed with the sounds of fire. In my work overall, I am interested in overcoming of the idea of creation as an aggressive power, towards the idea of creation as close to melancholia, surrender, humility, and smallness. Agnes Martin, the American painter that is often referred to as a minimalist, who recently passed away, said once that she was trying to be as small as a grain of sand.

AS

Critics have defined your work in the context of minimalists. In your works we often see elements which, in the larger culture, are referred to as the mythological time. Time in your art, which I would call a spiral time, is a place of eternal return and repetition. Through the rituals of intellectual cleansing, through showing the seasons of the year, referencing the natural phenomena and your relationship to them, this return to the same activity offers a possibility of renewal and rebirth. In your act of drawing around the body, we see also a form of embryo or zygote.

Audience

This is very interesting that even though you create a sense of isolation, and you maintain a solitary focus, you also provoke us to nevertheless enter the image.

MW
People often touch my objects without any instruction, invitation, or conversely, forbidding. People bend towards the chalice, take books into their hands, read them. Especially children, who have that kind of energy, which reminds me of water and fire. They are at the threshold of becoming, of individuation. I am divided from them by their difference. It is the difference between my body and theirs, their not yet completely formed figures. In the public space children are much more courageous and unpredictable.

AS

These are participants whose culture was not yet formed.

MW

In this cycle of projects there is no choreography. I open the space of drawing or painting. I don't know what will happen, nor even if it will happen. It is about awaiting of the unknown. Similar to the awaiting that precedes a more traditional way of drawing in a studio, which is the awaiting for a mark or a trace. In the spaces of drawing and sound that are open to others, I propose the position of lying on the ground. In public spaces this is an unexpected action. Within the exhibition Five Rivers, which is opening this fall at the Lehman College Art Gallery [CUNY] one of the installations will be a mythological river of lament and sound, where the opera vocalist will lie down on the ground while singing.

AS

The role of breathing in contemporary performance art is very important, especially influencing how we situate our energy and our body.

MW

Everything is breathing and is performative, in a state of continuous becoming. I prefer not to use the word “performance” because it connotes an act that has a beginning and an end. In fact, my work is more connected to “process art”. The compositional lines in my work are meant to create a specific space. The compositions are built from my body and in general from presence. Of course, our body cannot completely merge with the world because we have an anthropocentric viewpoint. But at least I am trying.

AS
Zofia Kulik said once about being “a compliant psycho-physical instrument”.

Dominic Leiman (DL), in the audience:

Monika, you spoke of performativity and about the act of inhabiting of a space, which highlights the differences between your actions and the linear performance, with which you prefer not to be identified. What really interests me in the documentation of your actions, is what you understand as a given action in a given space - which through your action becomes performative - and then, you create a new formula for documentation of your action. These are two different types of time. One of them, as Aneta has said, is the spiral time, mythological time. I have been observing your art for a longer time now, and I know that your video is not a documentation. You manipulate it, you create commentaries, for example like in the project with the books. You become a witness to yourself. You can ultimately see yourself from a distance.

MW

There is a fluid boundary between presence and absence, between disappearance and leaving a trace; the evidence of what we are and where. Linear representation, the presence, is important to me but only as confronted with its own mirroring reflection. It could be said that traces are more important in my art then the presence itself. Recently, I have been thinking about a project, in which the access to the action will be limited, in which the viewers will be able to see only through a small Duchampian hole in the door.

DL

I came too late to a recent exhibition by Marina Abramovic in New York. In this project Abramovic inhabited the gallery for many days. She didn't eat, she was on public view. But when I came she wasn't there anymore and so I saw some traces, some kind of energy that was left. If I were to compare your art to the work of Abramovic, it's exactly in this moment where she wasn't there anymore where you are the closest to each other. I noticed that you ended your presentation today and you stopped the video exactly in the moment where your body almost but not exactly disappeared from the image.

MW

Yes. And this is perhaps why I call what I do an “image”. Reality becomes two-dimensional. It becomes a map. This is about leaving one's body and looking down. After finishing the long-term action of immersion in water, the virtual representation of my immersion is projected back into the sculpture. Through the layers of water that projected figure is looking back at us, and she is also looking back at me.

The conversation was conducted in Polish and recorded in front of a live audience on March 23, 2005 at the Institute of Art WYSPA, Gdańsk, Poland. It was subsequently published in PANOPTIKUM Audiovizualia film media sztuka n. 4 (11) 2005, Akademickie Centrum Kultury Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego.

Aneta Szyłak (1959-2023) was a Polish curator, writer, and founder and director of the Wyspa Institute of Art, as well as organizer and first director of Nomus - New Museum of Art. She curated exhibitions in Poland and abroad, and was the author or co-author of numerous publications on contemporary art. Szyłak taught and lectured at many art institutions and universities including Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem, New School University, Queens College, New York University, Florida Atlantic University, Goldsmith College, Copenhagen University, and was a guest professor at the Akademie für Bildende Künste in Mainz, Germany. She founded and ran the Alternativa Foundation, which promotes artistic, research and curatorial work in the field of visual arts. She held the post of Vice-President of the Polish Section of the International Association of Art Critics AICA and the CIMAM. Aneta Szyłak curated Architectures of Gender. Contemporary Women's Art in Poland, Sculpture Center, New York, Ewa Partum: Legality of Space, Wyspa, Gdańsk, and You won't feel a thing, Kunsthaus Dresden (with participation of Monika Weiss), among numerous other exhibitions internationally.