Radek Szlaga The exhibition at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle constitutes so far the broadest institutional presentation of Radek Szlaga’s artistic pratice. The show is titled Freedom Club. These were the initials used by Theodore John Kaczynski, an American of Polish origin, mathematical genius, graduate and professor at Harvard University, who at a young age abandoned a promising academic career, voluntarily excluding himself from society and devoting the rest of his life to a fight against modern civilisation. His means were radical and he become infamous as the ‘Unabomber’, an elusive terrorist, sending bomb letters from a remote cabin in Montana to scientists and corporate executives. The deadly parcels were signed ‘FC’, which he later asserted stood for ‘Freedom Club’. The super-intelligent Kaczynski skilfully covered up his tracks and left false many clues, successfully misleading the authorities for twenty years. The search for the ‘Unabomber’ became one of the lengthiest and most complex operations in the FBI’s history. Kaczynski was finally apprehended in 1996. No evidence was found during his trial that a ‘Freedom Club’ had ever existed and there are all indications to believe that it was Kaczynski’s invention. Nonetheless, Radek Szlaga undertakes his own investigation regarding the mythical organisation. The exhibition becomes a visual inquiry into what the Freedom Club is, or could be. Painting becomes a way of collecting and processing visual tropes that can help the artist (and the viewer) pick up a trail of the Freedom Club. Szlaga searches for images, representations of the ideas that motivated ‘Ted’ Kaczynski and that could serve as inspiration for the followers of his work. Anarcho-primitivism, resistance against social hierarchies and civilisational rigours, hostility towards the technological expansion in all areas of life, aversion to power, dreams of a return to primeval freedom – those are some of the notions that the Unabomber employed and that comprise the subversive discourse of the Freedom Club. Szlaga discovers the outlines of those notions among images of Others, of the excluded, the inferior, the second-rate citizens – the potential recruits of an anti-systemic rebellion. Investigating Kaczynski’s Polish roots, the artist returns to the Polish countryside, finding his own roots. He depicts Ochotnica, a village at the foot of the Szlagówka mountain and a cradle of the Szlaga family – a semi-mythical country where people live close to animals, and civilisation clashes with the powers of ancient superstitions. From there the trail goes to America, where many of the artist’s relatives have emigrated in search of a better life. But in Szlaga’s narrative the American promised land assumes the form of Detroit, a fallen city that has gone bankrupt, is depopulating at a rapid pace, and functions today as a symbol of a nasty awakening from the ‘American dream’. Between Szlagówka and Detroit roam demons and hogs, cannibals and highlanders, bandits and peasants, dwarves and ancestor spirits, Africans and Poles, African Americans and immigrants – the protagonists of Szlaga’s painting show. Time and again, this spectacle leaves the picture frame. In the shadow of the art works, the artist installs in the gallery space artefacts that do not fit the order of painterly representation, bringing in car wrecks, highlighting macabre trophies and stuffed chicken heads, growing potatoes under glass in the exhibition room, and setting up a distillery at the back to produce moonshine – in praise of the idea of informal economy. In the centre of the show Szlaga places a map of the world and portraits of his parents, creating an image of cosmos and inscribing his own genealogy in it. This cosmogonic gesture suggests that creating an exhibition is the same as building a model of a personal universe. This would be a represented world, a world built of the visual substance of images remaining in constant flux. Szlaga mixes found images with those produced by his imagination, multiplying, repeating, copying and distorting them, reflecting them in each other. Reality becomes an image and image becomes reality – like the obsessively recurring motif of a burnt-out car wreck. The wreck – an evidence of a riot, a bomb attack, an insurance fraud or an economic crash, or perhaps a victim of the revolutionary vandalism of technology-combating anarcho-primitivists – appears first as a representation but a moment later materialises in the gallery as a physical object illustrating the paintings. Does this mean that if an image of the Freedom Club is found the organisation will become real? The same question can be asked of the exhibition as a whole. Among the many paintings Szlaga places a manuscript, an illuminated book that is a chronicle of his Freedom Club-related investigations and a source, a matrix, for all the other images – and at the same time a mirror in which the exhibition is reflected. Near the book stands a watchtower. On its top is an eye that scans the exhibition. Is the great eye an allegory of the painter’s all-seeing gaze, a gaze that crystallises into an image? Or is it that the painter himself is kept under surveillance by an eye he has created? In the world of the Freedom Club, both answers are equally good.
|