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Iwona Kurz

POST PICTURA. PHOTO-BIO-GRAPHY

Marta Zgierska, Afterbeauty, Monograph, Biala Gallery, Lublin, Poland, February 2019

1.

„Talented, conscientious and hard-working,” a rst grade elementary school teacher wroteabout Marta Zgierska in the midyear descriptive assessment. e teacher’s handwritingis very neat, almost a bit childish, as if the evaluation was made by the student herselfand not by her mentor. As a result, it is dicult to determine whether this descriptionis a portrait or rather a selfportrait, which says a lot more about its author than about theperson who is being aperson who is being assessed. And if it is actually the portrait, then how accurate is it?Who would agree to be reduced down to the image seen at school, from the perspective ofthe teacher’s desk? In the rst grade? And yet, on the other hand, the mask that we put onfor the purposes of the school procedures and school grades stays with us for the followingyears, educing a certain entity embedded in an educational institution – a concrete image,which trails along behind us like a grimace permanently glued to our face.

A page from a checked notebook, along with the description it contains, is a souvenir.Its status Its status raises the moment it becomes part of the exhibition and is displayed in frames.It is the result of the processes of thinking and writing, a material sign of a certain social,perhaps also personal, relation. Hence, for the starting point of her exhibition – of herautobiography, the artist chooses an object, and not a photograph of an object. is objectis only seemingly unequivocal. It rather provokes questions about identity than providesanswers. Furthermore, from the very beginning it, in fact, challenges the obviousness ofraising such questions. However, such an attempt has been made and we nd ourselvesin in a position of incessant negotiating between the experience and the observation, theinternal process and the view from the outside, between what is underneath the surfaceand the surface itself, the face and the mask.

Marta Zgierska had found the paper in some family stu just before the accident whichbecame a new “starting point” of her life. Everything that happened later is referred to as“post”. erefore, this page with the assessment is not only a school certicate that every-one possesses (even if not everyone has been an exemplary student), but it is also a pointof of reference to a certain experience in the artist’s biography, which is paradoxical in thesense that it has not been lived through, but, still, it has le a mark (trauma) and turneda normal course of life upside down.

What is directly related to the accident is the oldest series presented at the exhibition,namely Post. e title is ambiguous. e photographs refer to the event from the artist’sbiography, and some of them even document its traces. However, the event itself has been

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Iwona Kurz Post pictura. Photo-bio-graphy

neither photographed nor documented in any way. Instead, the artist is searching for ametaphorical point of reference to her nonexperience. Not only is this a “post-event”, butit is also a post-image, a product of the traumatized imagination rather than of memory.is is the image which is like a broken mirror – fragmented into a myriad of pieces.

Each of those pieces is sharp: clear, reecting – even symbolically – a part of “self”, and,at the same time, hurting. Sharp objects emerge from the white with unusual violence,painting deformpainting deformed, trapped gures. Is it possible to put the pieces together and makethem whole again?

2.

And what if there is only the surface? e photographer Lorne Liesenfeld strongly defendsthe “façade” of a photograph claiming that this is the surface that is the only truth aboutthe image.1

e assessment paper marks the beginning also in a dierent, socio-biographical context.It It refers to the moment when we become part of the society, along with its existing normsand rules. It can be perceived as the starting point in the process of becoming, oscillatingbetween two extremes: conforming and opposing, taking roots but also raising above andgoing beyond. In this sense, the accident should not be seen as an occurrence, an en-croachment of fortune into life, but as a concentration and reinforcement of processescharacteristic of life. It is both a trap and liberation.

is tension is visible in the subsequent series by Marta Zgierska, in which photographymmeets with sculpture. However, before the tension is created, a lot has to happen. Newworks require arduous processing of the matter, stru ling with substance and physicality,accompanied by incessant references to corporeality. Aerbeauty uses old beauty masks,applied on face to the risk of losing it. Numbness presents a collection of face casts. InDri, the face leaves its imprint on the fabric, in the blackness of the canvas, evokingassociations with the negative, which Witold Kanicki describes as “the blue pole of pho-tography.”2 ese series function on three dierent levels of “I”. Aerbeauty has found itsinspiinspiration in modern canons of beauty, in internalized cultural codes connected withthe ideal of femininity. In a sense, the photographer detaches them from the concrete,transforms into abstract, used forms, and hence neutralizes them, even though the naleect takes the glamour form. Numbness operates on the level of emotions. eir epheme-rality, changeability and elusiveness, expressed by a momentary contraction or a facialgrimace, have been preserved in the sculptural matter, on the rough paper, providingstrong sensory impressions and provoking the desire to touch them. ese pieces havea verya very tactile potential, which is developed between the author, working in and on thematter, and the viewers touching the rough surface of the prints with their sight. Butwill the gallery allow for the real touch? Similarly, the sight wanders over the canvas on

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Iwona Kurz Post pictura. Photo-bio-graphy

which the works from the series Dri were printed. In this case we enter the realm of theunconscious, which uses dreams and fantasies, and immerses “I” in the sea of blackness.e biographical allusions are still present here, as the series refers to a coma into which

the artist sank aer the accident.

Furthermore, this is also where the autobiography reveals its bios potential: body/face issubjected to a number of procedures; it is juxtaposed with the external substance, whichnot only encnot only encroaches on the corporeality, but also imposes its form on it. e photographpreserves and strengthens the form. Furthermore, in all these instances it has been used asa mask. e photograph is the nal stage of a certain process – its culmination or, simply,its validation, as well as the physical record of the result of the process. According toRoland Barthes, the photograph should always come “aer” the fact “that-has-been”. Heseeks one of the most important features of photography, its sting, its punctum, whichis time.3 However, as long as the series Post has been inuenced by the accident, whichBarthes Barthes refers to as the photograph’s adventure, nothing has been le to chance in the caseof its artistic form. is is not a coincidence that Marta Zgierska’s art is dominated byportraiture – one of the genres that the philosopher found most compelling. His reec-tions developed in Camera Lucida revolve around the photos of his mother and take theform of mourning aer her death. It is the portrait that reveals most strongly the tensionbetween the particular and the contingency, between the pure event registered by thisphotograph (tuché) and the meaning understood as the product of a society and of its his-tortory, and manifesting itself in the form of a mask is assumes.

Sharpness and substantial tactility of the photograph serve the mask, whose nal form isthe death mask. Work on her own biography, along with the artistic choices made, ledMarta Zgierska in a dierent direction though. Here the mask and the face remain in therelation of constant exchange. As Jean-Luc Nancy wrote:

Face [on a mask] is an illusion, not because it imitates something, but because it is

created – produced, developed, molded, formed, colored, and decorated – in accor-

dandance with what it is supposed to represent, when it observes us and looks us in the

eye: the appeal, invitation, spell, admonition, assignment of a certain role or a task,

verication, waiting for an answer, credibility, commitment.

e mask engages in the relation and invites the face to join.4

3.

e assessment is also a form of the mask. However, it is deprived of “depth” and it cannotbe reversed, hence its relation with the face remains unclear, even broken. Still, it becomesthe starting point for an innite exchanthe starting point for an innite exchange of meanings between the face subjected topainful and draining procedures, the face (consciously) expressing and (unconsciously)

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Iwona Kurz Post pictura. Photo-bio-graphy

reecting emotions, and the mask, the surface, the permanent form of these micro-events,which it both preserves and puts to death.

is constant exchange, the never-ending oscillation between the “I” and its social formis also transferred to the ambiguity of the self-portrait as a form of autobiography. Paulde Man wrote:

Autobiography, then, is not a genre or a mode, but a gure of reading or of under-

standing that ostanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts. e autobiographical moment

happens as an alignment between the two subjects involved in the process of reading

in which they determine each other by mutual reexive substitution. e structure

implies dierentiation as well as similarity, since both depend on a substitutive ex-

change that constitutes the subject.5

erefore, not only life produces the autobiography, but it is also the autobiographicalproject that may itself produce the “I”; the subject takes actions “governed by the technicaldemands of self-portdemands of self-portraiture.” Photography is a dierent form of “self-creation” thanwriting, but in the result of both operating the recurrent form and referring to the mask,it assumes the narrative character, or at least – the meaning. And it comes closer to it,the more distant it is from the individual experience, heading towards abstraction (themore the beauty mask fails to adhere to the face and becomes “a beautiful form”; the morethe face cast detaches from a certain facial grimace; the more the imprint on the canvascovers the face). Hence the tension between the life of an individual and life individuallyexperienexperienced, as well as the forms of life, which are repetitive and shared, is constantlypalpable and fueled.

Not only, then, is there the exchange between the face and the mask, as well as betweenthe I and the autobiographical I, but there is also the exchange between the “I” of theartist and the “I” of the viewer. And that is because the most fundamental here is for theviewers to nd themselves in this image. It is possible due to a sequence of transforma-tions, which lead from the biographical, violent and dramatic event to what can be callednew formulas of pathos: the material imprints of emotions. e term new formulas of pathos: the material imprints of emotions. e term Pathosformel coinedby Aby Warburg describes recurring, emotionally charged, visual tropes, which are theactive force in the generation of style and forms.6 e term has been discussed andtransformed many times, most recently in the writings and curatorial activity of GeorgesDidi-Huberman, where the Pathosformel stands for combining the aect and the matter –a formal, but also material expression that the emotional energy nds.

In Marta Zgierska’s art, the materiality rst emerges along with the creative process, whenthe fathe face leaves its mark on the matter. en, it appears along with its eect – the photo-graph in a very clear substantial form. It contains both a model of life and the life itself.

However, there is a traumatic force, which also demands to be unearthed and addresses the viewers. Just like Didi-Huberman puts it in one of his books under the same title: “What we see looks back at us” (Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde, 1992). As a result, Zgierska’s art combines dierent aspects of photography – the individual character of an event, visible and revised on the surface, and a hidden structure consisting of subsequent transformations of signs, as well as dierent aspects of life – with the form imposed on it and the emotional energy, which insistently bursts it from the inside.

1 1 Lorne Liesenfeld, Cicha obecność Fotografii, collaborative translation, Luboń 2013.2 Cf. Witold Kanicki, Ujemny biegun fotografii. Negatywowe obrazy w sztuce nowoczesnej, słowo/obraz terytoria,

Gdańsk 2016.3 Cf. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, tr. Jacek Trznadel, Wydawnictwo KR,

Warsaw 1996.4 Jean-Luc Nancy, Zamaskowany – zdemaskowany, tr. Wojciech Dudzik, Dorota Sosnowska, in: Paradoksy

maski. Antologia, ed. Wojciech Dudzik, PWN, Warsaw 2018, p. 99–100.5 5 Paul de Man, Autobiography as Defacement, tr. Maria B. Fedewicz, „Pamiętnik Literacki” 1986, No. 2, p. 309.6 Cf. Aby Warburg, Dürer a antyk w Italii, in: thereof, Narodziny Wenus i inne szkice renesansowe, tr. Ryszard

Kasperowicz, słowo/obraz terytoria, Gdańsk 2010.

Iwona Kurz, PhD, director of the Institute of Polish Culture at University of Warsaw. Main field of interests: history of Polish culture of XX century in visual perspective, anthropology of visual culture, anthropology of body and gender.

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Iwona Kurz Post pictura. Photo-bio-graphy