Moby Dick - a figurability of sculpture

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Krzysztof M. Bednarski, "Moby Dick - Anima Mundi", Szczecin 2008 - instalacja. Fot.Grzegorz Solecki, Muzeum Narodowe, Szczecin.
Krzysztof M. Bednarski, "Moby Dick - Anima Mundi", Szczecin 2008 - instalacja. Fot.Grzegorz Solecki, Muzeum Narodowe, Szczecin.

Sculpture is a genre that wants to be forgiven. For its concrete three-dimensional nature and its physical occupation of space, on account of which it can't play on the multiplication of styles and the repetition of forms. Krzysztof M. Bednarski has felt this problem dramatically and has realized a collection of works capable of highlighting more the irrepeatable identity of a work than the subjectivity of its author.

Bednarski's sculpture is figurative, aimed at representing the river, the drawbridge. While arte povera seeks a linguistic ratification with the abstraction of the international artistic research of the anglosaxon and nordic style, he has moved ahead to develop a figurability of sculpture which leads him towards a culturized rather than elementary iconography. In this case the tautological presentation of natural materials is anticipated and supplanted by a principle of representation which implies not only primary memory but also the figurative conjugation of the object. In this way sculpture becomes a genre which works against every reduction and respects the law of recognizability.

If Carl Andre felt the need to demolish Brancusi's infinte column, Bednarski, with Mediterranean gentleness, doesn't see geometry as an antagonistic power in nature but as an opportunity to dialogue with it. The dialogue doesn't emphasize the fluid material but strengthens its permeability and its capacity to adapt. The interlace between structure and nature avoids a fall into the late-futurist naturalism of arte povera and introduces the possibility of a conjugation between the figure and the model, thus overcoming the foundation of a falsely common object, as occurred with pop art. In fact, American art tended to support the gaze of everyday observation, while Bednarski, with his elaborate representations, asks the spectator to shift into another position, that of the specific contemplation of an art work. Made to measure, these sculptures bring to perfection the quality of the materials redirected from their initial use or preserved in their plastic quality in order to participate in the formal elaboration of the new object. In fact, they're not surrounded by a metaphysical atmosphere, the natural effect of any suspension or dislocation. Here sculpture is allowed to conjugate in space with the double possibility of fantastical image and concrete form form.

Moby Dick inhabits the enclosed space of the museum in extreme liberty, suspended from hooks in the walls. The Melvillesque memory of adventure and his stage props are ironically inserted in the sculpture, hand-made by the artist, who doesn't want imagination to break through the place that contains it, but to create a relationship between inside and outside, between the elaboration of a literary fiction and manual labour, which seeks in the abstract image of a purely distant primitive universe a definitive and concrete form.

Krzysztof M. Bednarski, Moby Dick - Anima Mund, Szczecin 2008 - instalacja, Fot. Grzegorz Solecki, Muzeum Narodowe, Szczecin.
Krzysztof M. Bednarski, Moby Dick - Anima Mund, Szczecin 2008 - instalacja, Fot. Grzegorz Solecki, Muzeum Narodowe, Szczecin.

Bednarski is the artefice of a total art who, like Lucio Fontana, knows how to impress his formal seal on matter in order to open it, beyond the partiality of his use of it, towards the totality of an anthropological image which doesn't recognise high and low, left and right, vertical and horizontal. He establishes the circularity of a space which doesn't superimpose itself on that of everyday life, but instead draws it into the depths of a work which doesn't remain mute but extends itself to the borders of sight, penetrating beyond the eye into the depths of the psyche. At this point there's a short-circuit, a meeting between emotion and memory, intellect and feeling, sculpture and nature. Only in this way can sculpture obtain forgiveness, authorization to firmly inhabit the world, not as decoration but as motivated presence.

Bednarski's sculptures have definitively innovated the Polish art panorama, going beyond pop-art and processual art and introducing into the idea of collectionism unsettling and non-tranquilising objects, falsely exact reproductions of reality, and through this introduction into space an aesthetic contemplation of recast anthropological forms, where life and death, form and matter, painting and sculpture unitarially co-inhabit as signs of a Mediterranean imaginary.

Bednarski's works in essence take up Picasso's declaration on art directed at the world. Art in fact departs from the world to return in original forms which combat conviction. In this sense these works are emblematic, in so far as they also decode our sense of death, taking it outside its low and bestial meaning and shifting it into a spiritual dimension beneficial for humanity. In fact, Bednarski's ambiguous language of both deconstruction and reconstruction amplifies the specific weight of the object, whether whale or boat. It intensifies the specific connotation, amplifying its significance from arm of death to arm of sensibility. Vitality is in fact the fundamental characteristic of all Bednarski's poetic, which seeks to overturn our everyday sense of all things. The purpose of art is in fact to push reality towards a condition of impossibility, contradiction and paradox. In this case the paradox consists in the falsely mimetic reconstruction which iconographically preserves the threatening connotation and, at the same time, triggers another, directed at the positive fantasy of man as a social animal.

Krzysztof M. Bednarski, Moby Dick - Anima Mundi, Szczecin 2008 - fragment instalacji, Fot. Grzegorz Solecki, Muzeum Narodowe, Sz
Krzysztof M. Bednarski, Moby Dick - Anima Mundi, Szczecin 2008 - fragment instalacji, Fot. Grzegorz Solecki, Muzeum Narodowe, Sz

The rule of the art corresponds to the discipline of the form, capable of shifting reality into its phenomenological aspect, into a new frontier where everything becomes indispensable and symbolic. At heart, disarming war becomes the task of art. This was also the sense of the exhibits, which increased the level of intensity of forms that don't serve to embellish the world but to increase the arsenal of our sensibility.

"What does language speak of in the word space? In the word space it speaks of making - and leaving - space. Which means breaking up, clearing. This making space frees up, creates an opening for the installing and inhabiting of man" (Heidegger). Bednarski has constructed his own hand-made island of images where, however, even the sea is on the scale of the artist. This inevitably leads to a need to inhabit the space not only with the metaphor of language but also with the metonomy of the body.

Island also means separation and isolation. But no uninhabited or unknown island exists any more. It is found size, like a ready-made, but also constructed like an architecture in its anthropomorphic elements. Essentially Bednarski demonstrates how a work of art, even though three dimensional, is not traversable by the spectator, who can merely contemplate it from a minimal but insurmountable distance. The artist, on the other hand, internally inhabits his work, experiences its spatial depth and temporal duration and breathes it freely, without holding his breath or feeling in any way estranged.

Bednarski has never been astonished or amazed by his manufactured objects. He has always developed a relationship of familiarity and play, typical of someone with an understanding of relationships and a profound awareness of rules.

As a result, Moby Dick becomes an anthropological and geographic notion, capable of retaining within its own perimeter both nature and culture, the presentation of materials as well as iconographic representation. In this island one celebrates the primitive space of the feast, where neither high or low, right or left, vertical or horizontal exist, but rather the simultaneous interlacing of an alternative space-time dimension, revealer of that unease with civilisation described by Levi-Strauss with regard to anthropological research into the primitive, clearly laden with totality.

translated from Italian by Andrew Mutter

Krzysztof. M. Bednarski, Anima Mundi. Moby Dick 1987-2008, Muzeum Sztuki Współczesnej, Szczecin, 22.04-25.05.2008

Krzysztof M. Bednarski, Moby Dick - Anima Mundi - wejście na wystawę, Szczecin 2008, Fot. Grzegorz Solecki, Muzeum Narodowe, Szc
Krzysztof M. Bednarski, Moby Dick - Anima Mundi - wejście na wystawę, Szczecin 2008, Fot. Grzegorz Solecki, Muzeum Narodowe, Szczecin

Krzysztof M. Bednarski, Szczecin, kwiecień 2008,
Krzysztof M. Bednarski, Szczecin, kwiecień 2008,