Jakub Julian Ziolkowski - contemporary Polish painting

The Great Battle Under the Table, 2006
Oil on canvas
190 x 165 cm / 74 3/4 x 65 in

The Garden, 2008
Oil on canvas
105 x 82 cm / 41 3/8 x 32 1/4 in

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Jakub Julian Ziolkowski (b. 1980) - Polish painter, lives and works in Krakow, Poland.

Well, there seems to be a considerable, positive 'buzz' around this artist on the international art-scene... A Cinderella story, if one considers a newly graduated painter from a (still) 'provincial' Eastern Europe (Ziolkowski graduated from "Jan Matejko Academy of Art" in Krakow in 2005) having a successful, acclaimed exhibition in the Hauser and Wirth in London. At the moment, his paintings hang among others in MOMA - NY, at the prestigious "The Generational: Younger than Jesus" exhibition - a great, visionary event aiming at promoting the youngest, promising artists from around the world. And Jerry Saltz writes about them in the 'New York - Art Magazine': Jakub Julian Ziolkowski’s paintings aren’t about academic ideas of formalism, happy doodling, or mannered figuration; they’re visionary Bosch-meets-Ensor. (click on the link to read the entire review).

Not too bad at all as for an emerging artist...

Personally, what I find especially compelling about Ziolkowski's work, is ... its perverse realism...

"Realism?!" - I can hear you doubting - Call it sur-, call it magical -, call it dada-, but not just 'realism', for Christ's sake ...

Well, they are realistic paintings - I can guess so, seeing this particular painter as my never-met mate from the same yard. We share our generation, our actual and, in parts - spiritual landscape - being born and brought up in one culture at the same time... Our education belonged to one of the most classical in Europe (in the world?), we were still taught that Greek/Roman mythology, classical philosophy together with The Bible are totally responsible for how we think and perceive reality and ourselves.

So, reality is anything but a plaything to be messed with, reality is the residence of gods' and humans' stories - it exists to be reported, to be told, not to be ignored or subverted for the rebellion's own sake... We may be tempted, of course, to turn our backs on it, to exorcise it from all the evil, cruelty and confusion so deeply ingrained into its tissue. We are the Polish X-generation from 90s, 00s - born out of oppressed parents into a world that could hardly offer us anything, except a perpetual struggle for survival - to a country being itself a huge mess due to a political, economic and cultural transformation... Millions of us from this very generation, from highly educated to those 'just' 'resourceful' ones, had left their homes as soon as the borders of Europe had been finally opened... And crossing borders, alike staying behind on a land being slowly deserted by familiar faces and ideas - that makes one a realist - not matter what - a realist in a deep conflict with reality...

And there are hints of those intimate wars being fought in Ziolkowski's paintings - battles between a duty to tell the 'gods and humans' stories as they are, and the perversion of imagination, troubled by the insecure, heartless world around. Battles are fought under a table, while a huge spider-web covers after-Van Gogh's-like wheat-field (Untitled, above) ... well, it didn't surprise me when I read a reputable Polish author (of the older generation) commenting on Ziolkowski's 'dreamy hallucinations' and his 'private worlds of phobias'... Traditionalists would never accept Francis Bacon's concept of the 'concentrated reality' - being conveyed not merely as an illustration but an extract of it - presenting itself so intensely real that... mesmerizingly or shockingly unreal...

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Liminality in Art (2)

The notions of boundaries, borders, limits, thresholds and so on may be as ancient as the human population itself. In Greek/Roman mythology they are expressed by names of different gods/goddesses, hybrids and monsters - Zeus cares for the Olympus, Poseidon is a guardian of waters, Hades rules in the Underground; forests, agriculture, arts and law - every human (divine and monstrous as well) activity and embodiment of the spirit has its own powerful protector/ rules maker and no interference is into each other territory is tolerated.

Religions exist due the numerous polarities, and the most popular story of creation (Book of Genesis) had started exactly from this - from a separation and making sharp divisions between elements and the mater. In order to survive the species would have to define and fight for the territories and the evolution of the human race is an 'epopee' of transcending the boundaries of nature, space and time...

The social, cultural and personal identity couldn't be possible at all without the ongoing, often uncompromising process of the differentation. And when philosophy tends to look for an unity and structure in the universe despite of all the intrinsic and imposed/created dichotomies, art in general would indulge in exploring the world as seen within the "frame" (think now about Derrida's "The truth in painting" and his deconstruction attempt of all the 'frames' we tend to see the art through) and beyond it.

And so it goes - Christ would be a 'worthy' subject, but even some of his disciples not exactly; harmonious human body was only true representation - the ugly/mutilated one was worse than some of the animals ; one 'breed' of art-view was 'high' (read: 'true'), the others were 'pseudo-'; painting the landscape naturally excluded the sky-view and the figurative works were exorcised of all the abstract elements (and vice versa). The universe seen as in an atom of a very particular concept/meaning or a set of those (lets say: christian version of god, humanists' vision of a man, romantic vision of a landscape, modernists' subversion to the classical art) which had to be frozen, clearly and in a division to its possible and apparent opposites... This is basically what all the history of the Western Art is about. About Old Testament God's job of making the world happen by creating borders between chaos and order, good and bad, light and dark, sky and earth, the animals and the human beings, the human beings and the Holy one.

Where the 'liminal' creeps into all of this? Well - right at the start, I guess and simply because the artistic activity in itself situates man on the existential threshold; a bit like a prayer or a sexual act - two different worlds meet and penetrate each other; the universe as it is (or appears to be) and the universe to be created... And the conscious artist is very likely to aim at or to be the 'passeur' -'a boatman', 'smuggler' - the man of passage, the guide who leads his audience beyond the status quo crossing social, cultural, psychological, spiritual and sometimes very physical boundaries in order to show/explain/challenge...

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This article is a part of a series "Liminality in art" where I intend to define and explore the philosophical and aesthetic notion of the liminality. Please, refer to other articles from the series in order to get the fuller view.

Liminality in Art (1)

This is meant to be an attempt in coining a new term in the Art Theory field.

Curiously enough, the term Liminality continues not to be recognised by the modern dictionaries of English; even though numerous (stated below) researchers have been using it in academic papers. It doesn't exist as an aesthetic concept or any distinguished phenomenon in the contemporary fine art. Yet, what I would like to claim and what is the reason of this article is my knowledge that this very notion has been persistently influencing the way of defining and interpreting art of the last decades at least. Though never or very rarely (in its adjective form of the liminal) applied as such by the art critics and scholars it has been circulating in the air each time the hybridity, borderline qualities, formlessness or intersemiotics of the Postmodernism has been loathed or admired.

From Latin limen meaning threshold 'liminality' is an existential (metaphysical) subjective, state and realm of hovering 'between and betwixt' of two (or more) different planes, spaces and/or existential qualities. First described in anthropology (Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner) as a social theory of the liminal states - spaces of a 'temporary outcast' when an individual or a group is being placed by the society on its margin in a ritual of purification and/or recognition. It has got also its usage in the contemporary psychology where the liminal means sub- or unconscious state with one's sense identity being 'hold' or dissolved to some extent. In contemporary philosophy J. Derrida has been called the 'philosopher of the liminal' due to his deconstruction attempts of the integral and solid tissue of materiality (more about it in the next parts of this series).

In visual art the 'threshold's ' aesthetics has been described on the theatre, cinema and performance field (notably S. Zizek, S. Broadhurst) and some curatorial and critical attempts has been made to embrace the liminality of the contemporary artistic expression done by more or less traditional media. Yet, it's basically the 'no man's land' when painting or sculpture is considered - those realms remain, for the today's critique and theory (and not surprisingly, by any means) immune to any 'revolutionary' 'new' aesthetic refurbishment; it became a sort of an ideological cliche - that it's more convenient to blame painting for its impotency (it's 'dead' anyway, why bother then?...) than to inject any potent conceptual spirit into it by an affirmative reflection.

When J-F. Lyotard has called Postmodernity the nascent state, the state of a permanent 'becoming' (The Postmodern Condition, 1979) he basically admitted its innate liminal character; and those artworks that seek to address this condition (both deliberately or not) are probably best recognised for their aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) of incompleteness - sculptures/installations look as if the artist ran out of the materials to finish them to a decent level; paintings seem to be painfully 'hanged' by their own guts with indescribable forms, unidentifiable colours and freaky techniques; videos cry out for any structure, even a hint of a narrative. Their 'becomingness' is the only existence they know and it comes invariably as disquieting or even disturbing for the audience. No without a reason the primitive societies considered the liminal states as dangerous, unclean (Turner); and those affected were isolated 'pro publico bono'.

As hazardous and monstrous in moments as the liminality in art (and beyond it) seems to appear it is also probably the only truly creative state, which - if used wisely - can result in some profound discoveries and metamorphoses. This fructile chaos and the storehouse of possibilities (Turner) is a goldsmith's workshop of the contemporary art; even though some purists rise an alarm that the state of the constant flux and indeterminacy (where 'everything goes') will annihilate all the miserable bits of art that left - let's be positive... Art is best cared for if it's accepted just as it appears and shapes itself through the mill of the human spirit; even if refuses to 'become' and fit any new uniform - so what?... As far as minds and hearts are enflamed by it, even with a doubt, even with a turmoil - it fulfills its calling of the 'fifth element' - the force of life and death, possibility and danger, sanctus and profane...

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In the further studies on Liminality in Art (being a part of my studies on the Contemporary Art) I would bring closer the views of the scholars, philosophers mentioned above, as well as I will try to illustrate the theory with some artworks.

Peter Doig or 'Viva la peinture!'

A friend has challenged me to pick out one artist, whose work will still 'matter' in 40 years time. Well, imagine we've got 2050; the number alone looks pretty surreal; doesn't it? The same can surely be said about the quantity of the imagery out there - buzzing, flashing, tempting, repulsive, genius and rubbish... But - what will be there considered as the great 'classic' - something that had been created at the turn of the centuries? Will be there any need for the 'classics' at all; who knows, maybe the 'classic' will actually mean the 'clutter' of no other than an abstract, historical value?

Well, we are we?

An artist important for my children' children, for generations with a different sense of time, space, culture (presumably); with a changed view on the 20th/21st century... That all makes the guessing game a pure shot in the dark really...

I put Peter Doig in the title as a sort of a 'tease' and a challenge. I do consider him influential and important now; I would risk stating that his particular vision of painting (notably - changing/being modified all the time) will survive through his own generation of artists - let's say - 10 more years; as well as I can predict than many of the painters from my 'class' will carry Doig's 'germs' with them for some time. Yet - to tell - that P. D.'s impossibly romantic and surprisingly (in comparison with the majority) well painted magical landscapes will break the price records in 2050? Simply impossible - and - a bit pointless perhaps... Because, why to bother with that in the first place in the era of the flux? Let's enjoy our present time - future is nothing more than the act of accepting, respecting and giving the foundations to the 'here and now'...

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Peter Doig (b. 1959) - Scottish-born painter, brought up in Canada and art-educated in London. From 2002, living and working in Trinidad (studio at the Caribbean Contemporary Arts centre) . Professor at the fine arts academy in Duesseldorf, Germany. Considered as one of the most important and influential painters working today.

Doig is both acclaimed and criticized for his paint-handling - carefully layered, with the impressive sensitivity to the colour scale (his landscapes look like there is 'every colour' in it; a reason for clapping or doubting?) - his paintings are a triumph of the contemporary painterly technique. Even if his concepts seem for some to be too 'eerie' to be true; in moments strangely sweet-ish and naive; he's managed to capture hearts and imagination of hundreds, both from the 'professional' and the 'spectators's side...

What I find especially compelling about his older (late 1990s - early 2000s) works is their ongoing chase for the uncanny - there is, in some of the landscapes that extremely difficult to create moment, where a beautiful on its own, sophisticated yet 'just' - mark-making transforms into magic - the very essence of all art; the moment when you feel you hair raising at the back of your head - because you've just spotted and experienced the unsaid, the inexplicable, the horrific enchanted into a 'lovely' scene.
Other thing is - if this all was really meant there to be or 'came by' as a 'happy accident'?

Anyway, and despite of all - Doig is one of those artists who made me to believe in painting again...

To review P. Doig's recent retrospective at Tate - click the Exhibition.

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Art World - The Collectors

The collector's position within the art world is probably the most comfortable of all, since s/he is unlikely to act under any pressure from any part of the AW (Art World). He or she is the shaper and mover, the blessing and the curse for art in general. Despite having often a little or no artistic background or competency the collectors due to the sheer power of their social status and money make the AW what it is and what it is going to be.

Nowadays, the collectors are likely to treat their occupation as a professional sport and an (one of many) investment. They will engage actively in the dynamics of the AW- being, in fact, the stockholders of 'goods' on a highly risky market, where artists (artworks) are their portfolio and their actions (buying/selling - especially considerable amounts of works) influence directly the entire AW. Being the main clients of galleries and museums they are able to carve art accordingly to their taste channeling paths for a particular trend and discouraging the evolution of an another. Like in any sport (and investment) the good collectors display a well-built, competitive 'body' of the collection with the quality/quantity of works especially taken into account; they also take an active part in a public life of the AW and beyond it promoting and educating, curating and supporting the public institutions.

The good collector would comply with un-written code of ethics of the profession:

- to take the responsibility for the AW - especially the artists in his/her collection and those not yet included; take care for the healthy development of the AW as a whole

- to avoid abusing his/her status within the AW; this includes pressurizing artists, dealers or curators to comply or showing 'empty' interest in a work (without any serious intentions to buy)

- to support emerging artists and art colleges

- to avoid any pretense and deception games - the best art collectors are art lovers and investors; yet (since nobody is perfect) the ethically correct 'shoppers' will admit their predominantly commercial interest in art

- to foster the freedom of speech in art-related media and topics

Some famous art collectors:

• Bernard Arnault - French billionaire businessman and the richest man in France
• Alan Bond - Australian entrepreneur
  
• Eli Broad - Eli Broad Biography - Jewish American billionaire businessman and philanthropist
• Walter Chrysler - founder of the Chrysler Corporation
  
• David Geffen - Founder of Geffen Records, listed on Forbes Rich list
• Steve Martin - Famous comedian, actor, writer and art collector from the United States
• Charles Saatchi - Founder of the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi
• Sakip Sabanci - Billionaire Turkish businessman and famous philanthropist
• Kerry Stokes - Australian billionaire media magnate
  
• Steve Wynn - Las Vegas Casino and Resort Developer

Exuberant struggle for integrity - Burkhard Held

Flicking through the last issue of ARTFORUM I came across this not known to me German painter. Burkhard Held (b. 1953) lives and works in Berlin. He's been exhibiting persistently and widely for the last few decades.

His "Roter Berg" from 2008 - oil on canvas, conventional size, yet another application of the neo-expressionist language. Yet, it has the potential to catch the attention, not merely due to the exuberant, affirmative palette which looks confident comparing to many other propositions from the same trend. The portrayed scape conveys the impression of stability, self-assurance despite of the patchy construction and nervously wobbly marks - the imposed, inner discipline puts a form and an order on this would-be pictorial anarchy.

Held's work seems to explore the phenomena of a form and formlessness, integrity and a collapse, an existence and a hypothesis - and while some of his paintings appear to be deliberately suspended on the verge of 'melting down' (in a very fashionable today pictorial 'explosion' of shapes, spaces, meanings) there is a struggle to be appreciated - a fight for a structure and a sense; which both remain an endangered species in the contemporary art in general and in painting in particular.

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To see artist's page (in German) - Burkhard Held

Till February 21st, 2009 Michael Schultz Gallery in Berlin hosts the exhibition of the latest paintings of this artist.

Art Forum International is a well-edited monthly magazine featuring tens of oncoming and current art exhibitions and shows from around the world. Recommended to buy from time to time for the record-value, to visit online - ARTFORUM.