Read More | Issue 10 | July 09 | Circles and Squares | Igor Krenz

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Issue 10 | July 09

Circles and Squares Igor Krenz

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Text and images, 2009 Š artists, writers and Horsecross Arts Ltd

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artspace Threshold artspace launched in September 2005 in Perth, UK. It is home to Scotland’s only permanent collection of contemporary media art with 80 works acquired over 3 years. The artspace covers a number of project spaces available for artists’ interventions including an entrance box for interactive soundscapes; a ‘canvas’ of 22 flat screens dominating the artspace for multi-channel video art installations; an interactive playground for art games and live internet art; a trail of sound boxes and sensors embedded in the floor and ceiling; an audio visual treat in the public toilets; copper-clad roof for light artists. All Threshold artspace locations are linked together by ‘intelligent’ software which allows artworks to be displayed through curated exhibitions and experienced 24 hours a day throughout the year.

Horsecross is an independent arts agency delivering cultural, conference and community activity in Perth Concert Hall and Perth Theatre.

Located within the foyer of Perth Concert Hall Threshold artspace sits on the site of the original Horsecross, Perth’s 17th century horse market.

The name is synonymous with bustling activity in the heart of the city. The development of the £19.5m Perth Concert Hall and Threshold artspace was a Millennium project and is part of the area’s economic development strategy to position Perth as one of Europe’s most vibrant small cities by 2010.

Horsecross aims to put this part of central Scotland firmly on the cultural map both nationally and internationally.

The essay Humour and Error: The System vs The Break-Out in Igor Krenz's Practices by Piotr Krajewski was commissioned and published on the occasion of the commissioning, production and acquisition of Igor Krenz’s work Circles and Squares (2009) for the Horsecross permanent collection of contemporary art and its world premiere in April 2009 as part of Krenz’s first solo exhibition in a public institution in the UK. Krajewski’s essay was translated from Polish into English by Sherill Howard Pociecha. Krenz’s solo exhibition at Threshold arspace was the second in a three-part series of residencies, commissions and exhibitions at the Threshold artspace curated by Iliyana Nedkova and Urszula Sniegowska as part of Horsecross’ Scottish Tides | Polish Spring: a three month celebration of Scotland’s vibrant cultural connections with Poland.

Circles and Squares (2009) by Igor Krenz was produced by the artist and Horsecross for Threshold artspace in partnership with 55degrees, Glasgow and the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw. Supported by Scottish Arts Council New Work Fund, the Scottish Executive’s Homecoming Scotland 2009 and Adam Mickiewicz Institute’s Polska! Year.

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Humour and Error: The System vs The Break-Out in Igor Krenz's Practices Piotr Krajewski

Igor Krenz made his first video work in 1990 – a time when video art was gaining momentum in Poland but was still rare. Krenz had graduated a few years earlier from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, where he had studied industrial design. It is worth noting that when he was a student (1981 – 1986) Polish art schools did not offer courses in video art as it was not regarded as a fully-fledged artistic field.

Krenz is from that generation of Polish artists who took up video in the late 1980s out of their own personal incentive – not following any precedents but because video was an interesting new medium of expression, still free of any set conventions.

It was in this early phase that Krenz, working on his own with the camera against a white wall in his studio, defined his own ascetic aesthetics of direct recording, dealing with apparently casual allusions or complex systems of references, syllogisms and tautologies, but always full of engaging humour. In the confines of his studio he produced works remarkable for their rigorous consistency yet exuding the artist’s own self-doubt. Combining elements of fiction, scientific demonstration, parables and études, Krenz’s works include logic puzzles, installations, action and performance.

All of them are constructed around a very precise and restrained form imbued with a sense of risk and destabilization.

From the start of his creative endeavours Krenz juxtaposed meticulous underlying principles (reminiscent of conceptualism) with a playful game-like, sometimes rebus-like, mode of expression that leads to multiple levels of encoded meanings.

The poetic titles of the works play a significant part in this: they always implicate the content, and simultaneously introduce an element of uncertainty as to the intent. This combination of characteristics made Krenz's works immediately recognizable.

This did not, however, mean that Krenz's videos were immediately recognized by art circles – particularly since for the first few years the artist almost never showed his works in public. One of his first public screenings – and one that attracted considerable attention – was at the 1994 WRO Polish Monitor symposium in Wrocław, covering twenty years of Polish video art. The series Walk or Drive [Iść czy jechać] that was presented at that symposium consisted of works from 1990 to 1994, and it displays an extraordinary cohesiveness and maturity. The camera is the only witness of the artist's struggles with various ready-made objects and/or primitive homemade devices in scenes that are simultaneously tragic, lofty, absurd, banal, poetic and direly trivial.

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Humour and Error:

In Krenz's early works, such as Fire Is Better Than Scissors [Ogień jest lepszy od nożyczek] (1990), Bad/Not Bad/ Good/Very Bad [Źle/Nieźle/Dobrze/Bardzo źle] (1992-1993) and Only the Left Side of the Screen Exists [Tylko lewa strona ekranu istnieje] (1998), he touches upon a remarkably expressive paradigm that he returns to in some of his more recent pieces, such as Things (2002) and The White Wall (2005). The intimacy of the setting, the simultaneous objectivism and ironic sterility of the situations, the unity of place and the lack of any signs of passing time make it difficult to distinguish the older works from the more recent ones. Moreover, when screened as a series, these artist’s videos reveal many aspects that are not immediately apparent in individual pieces, and works that were made many years apart display an incredibly cohesive structure. It is thus sometimes intricate to separate Krenz's older works from his newer ones.

When viewed together, tensions and interrelations spontaneously arise among the pieces from various periods, making this series an exciting contemporary work in progress. The artist himself made the following observation on his presentation at the 2003 WRO Biennale: "My presentation is just one work that happens to consist of several 'separate' parts of such-andsuch length, made at such-and-such time. They're interesting because of their indefiniteness – the lack of anything entitled as a beginning, the lack of anything constructed as an ending. Their contextual meaning varies depending on where they appear."(1) Krenz's insightful perceptiveness avoids metaphor while hovering between the literal and the symbolic, and simultaneously engages in various levels of cognitive illusion and mental fun and games. Łukasz Gorczyca, whose Galeria Raster in Warsaw works frequently with Krenz, put it this way: "Everything he does includes a lot of sometimes-time-consuming humour but also an insightful, intelligent game with cognitive rationalism ... Igor knows how to instill the viewer with doubt about the simplest physical facts. At the same time he challenges – sometimes outrightly mocks – the established canon of video art, showing how much film conventions and illusions manipulate our beliefs, imaginations and emotions. ... Viewers have to find their own answers to some questions right away: what is the artist asking? and why does he intentionally ask questions that have no clear answers? and above all is it in fact a question? Or is it maybe an answer – a manifesto of intelligent doubt as the basis of aware existence in the world of today?" (2)

Art in Error Although Krenz’s videos hover in the realm of banal activities, the artist never indulges in banalization. His experiments and for-the-camera demonstrations are consistently simple and commonplace. They are sometimes quite succinct, and sometimes impossibly long and drawn out; the running time is frequently a consequence of an aim the artist set for himself at the outset. When he uses an improvised catapult to lob a pebble into an old tin, it takes him over 40 minutes to achieve that aim. That piece, entitled Stone and Can [Kamie_ i puszka] (1998), vividly illustrates the role that the consequences of error play in Krenz's work – error, and the cognitive and emotional perspective that he distils from error.

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Humour and Error:

A systemic approach to error also appears in Things (2002) – a piece that provides important insight into the artist's 12 years (at the time of writing) of performances for the camera. In this piece, Krenz has affixed six small rectangular frames at regular intervals in a row on the wall of his studio – ordinary photo frames about 13 x 18 centimetres. The artist's characteristic motionless camera, fixed to its tripod, shows all the frames hanging there, as well as a sizeable expanse of the studio's white wall and light-coloured floor. One by one the frames start falling to the floor. The artist appears on screen, picks them up from the floor and painstakingly reattaches them to the wall, attempting to ensure that each frame is returned to exactly the same spot. But the force of gravity is stronger than the adhesive used, and the frames keep falling. They fall at varying time intervals: sometimes one at a time, sometimes in rapid sequence, sometimes two or three of them do a synchronized fall.

Since the frames are small and light they are not damaged when they fall, and the artist keeps steadfastly and systematically collecting and re-mounting them up. During the brief respites when all the frames are hanging in their proper places on the wall, the artist goes off screen – only to return a few seconds later to calmly pick up a frame that had fallen once again. The studio, illuminated by normal lighting, appears so monochromatic that (as in many of Krenz's works) it is easy to mistake the piece for a black-and-white film. We do not know what is in the frames, since we see only uniform grey areas; even if they held drawings or photographs, we would not be able to see them, because of the camera's low resolution and distance from the wall.

There is nothing right about the falling frames. The order in which they fall is totally unrelated to the order in which they are re-affixed to the wall; sometimes one that has just been replaced falls, and sometimes one of them stays up there for a pretty long time. Viewing the work, we soon understand that although the situation keeps changing, it is going to remain essentially the same – that the artist has taken on the endless task of returning the frames to the wall without any notion of getting them to stay up there permanently. We see that although the rhythm of the activity is irregular, it is cyclical; that no new elements will be introduced, and there will be no resolution. Despite what seems to be his perpetual failure, the artist maintains exactly the same behaviour, making no attempt to alter his technique or reduce the error rate. He has no intention of changing or improving anything. The adhesive is not going to get any stronger, and frames are not going to by destroyed by falling down. The situation was unambiguous from the very start. The work manifests Krenz's characteristic systemic, experimental and existential approach to error, combining serious stoic patience with a large dose of humour.

Things can be viewed as just another metaphor for the individual's position in a world dominated by visual communication, presenting one’s constant efforts to stabilize an image of the contemporary world as a variation on the Sisyphus myth.

There are also many allusions to the art world in the work, including Malevich's Suprematism and classics of video art. The fact that the recording lasts exactly one hour – the maximum Krenz's MiniDV cassette would hold – is reminiscent of Bruce Nauman's classic performance pieces from the 1960s, which were also taped in the artist's own studio, and which also had no ending per se; instead, their running time was dictated by the length of the tape, which permitted 60 minute recordings.

Things also alludes to probability theory. It is particularly worth noting that Krenz steers clear of the aesthetics of Mandelbrot's fractal geometry and other familiar visualizations of chaos theory, such as the Cantor set lines or the Sierpi_ski carpet, and instead creates his own original and vivid cinematic demonstration of probability and chaos.

However, at the same time what we are watching here is a highly individual film about film as a sequence of still pictures – motion pictures are after all the result of the movement of frames containing still shots. The work is thus – maybe primarily – a statement about the limits of cinema and the ambiguity of the term ‘motion picture’. While Krenz's conscious exploration of the creative potential of error is reminiscent of Bas Jan Ader's approach, Peter Kubelka's ideas are the antecedent of his definition of film as an illusion of motion built up from static images.

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Humour and Error:

Krenz's KINO Era The CINEMA Film Company [Zespół Filmowy KINO] constitutes an interesting phase in Krenz's artistic practice. He started referring to that name in 1999 when he let other artists use his editing studio or assisted with their productions, and when he organized screenings of other artists' videos for friends and neighbours. For an artist so focused on his own rigour and methodology, the impact of this highly improvisational curatorial undertaking was enormous. It served as a counterbalance in his creative processes, as well as providing him with alternative artistic situations.

So did the Azorro Supergroup that Krenz and three other artists founded in 2001. That group has created hugely successful video works questioning the art world's established institutional categories of discourse. One of Azorro's pieces – Les Figurants (2005) – is a cinematographic work in a very particular sense of the term: the members of Azorro got hired as extras in a major international film biography of Pope John Paul II and insidiously misappropriated the film through their own subversive artistic activity. Unbeknownst to the director and film crew, the Azorro members managed to appear in the released version of the film in four contradictory roles: as Jews, priests, professors and Nazis. In addition, the Azorro project also included a series of photos from the film set, in which Krenz and the other members sport in their makeup and costumes, and an alternative poster announcing the film as an Azorro production.

They also showed the film as if it were an Azorro production at a few alternative film festivals, turning a normal screening into a subversive act, usurping the real creators of the film posing a series of questions: What is a film production? Who creates it? Who decides what it is really about, and who owns its content?

Circles and Squares (2009) or the Role of Abstraction in Film During the Illegal Practices (2008) show at the WRO Art Center, Wrocław, Krenz presented another of his projects on the theme of film as the art of moving pictures, the intentionality of cinematic form and the grammar of cinematic image. He subsequently developed that project into the 22-channel Circles and Squares installation commissioned

by Horsecross for the collection of contemporary art and shown at Threshold artspace as part of Krenz’s first individual exhibition in the UK. Underlying this work is Krenz's observation that most films distributed in Poland are as if branded by the hand of unknown artists, who leave mysterious circles and squares on every copy as they become part of a system for coordinating cinema projection. This is an example of an archaic cybernetics system, which is read not by machines, but by people with adequate training: cinema projectionists. In this system a major role is played by geometric abstraction, an element that has been virtually banished from the film screen – but it has a flourishing film career nevertheless, and is essential to maintaining cinematic illusion.

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Humour and Error:

In Poland, it wasn't until the mid-1990s that multi-screen theatres took over from small cinemas equipped with projectors that could handle only medium-sized reels. That system required the use of multiple projectors that had to be synchronized: a complete film took up five or six reels, each about 20 minutes in length, and when the reel on one projector was ending, the next one had to be started at precisely the right moment. It was important to avoid any interruption in the image flow, since feature film audiences are quite intolerant of technical flaws that hamper the cinematic illusion. The fact that this kind of synchronization was necessary several times during every film led to the development of a whole language of markings on the tape, comprised of circles and squares. These abstract forms, foreign to the film image and unrelated to the plot, were simultaneously visible and invisible: disregarded by audiences but serving as cues for projectionists. This analog signalling system was used in cinema for decades – and even though it is no longer needed, there's no way to get rid of it. It's like a virus: circles and squares that no longer serve any useful purpose have become a permanent part of film images, imbedded forever in cinematic history, and are faithfully reproduced on DVDs of the classic films they adorn. Following his characteristic fashion, Krenz, has managed to create his video work Circles and Squares from something marginal, utilitarian and fundamentally nonartistic. By ferreting out, condensing and enlarging these markings, he constructs an abstract but thoroughly concrete work that resembles the crude animation of absolute cinema – a radical artistic movement that originated in the mid-1920s which used film as a medium for abstract art, and which was ignored for decades by film and art historians alike.

There is no film theory that describes this system of symbols that are found in films and are connected with them without being part of them, or even media theory that explains why we fail to see something that is quite visible merely because it is not part of what we consider the film's real content. What we have instead are Krenz's works, about which Violetta Kutlubasis-Krajewska wrote, in an essay accompanying for the WRO Art Center show: "[They] are obstinate and repetitive, and they take place in non-official space – hidden and accessible only to trusted viewers. They are against something – against the established order, sometimes revealing deficiencies, sometimes breaking down barriers. ... Krenz's analytical and ultra-rigorous consistency entails a particular approach to media, treating them as a malleable material whose shape and value are never finalized. History and art history are full of signs that can be misleading and events that may be different from what is apparent, and sabotage is always worthwhile in order to test, and sometimes confirm, their contemporary value." (3) The End Notes 1. Krenz, Igor, 2003. Globalica. Igor Krenz's Screening. In WRO 03 International Media Art Biennale, Wroc_aw. Catalogue. [Online] Available at: http://wro03.wrocenter.pl/specials/krenz_screening-pl.html [accessed 25 November 2009] 2. Gorczyca, _ukasz, 2008. Igor Krenz. Artist’s Profile. In Independent. Independent Polish Culture. [Online] Available at: http://independent. pl/krenz_igor [accessed 25 November 2009] 3. Krajewska, Violetta Kutlubasis, 2008. Igor Krenz's Illegal Practices. In WRO Art Center, Wroc_aw. Exhibition Catalogue. [Online] Available at: http://wrocenter.pl/pl/node/203 [accessed 25 November 2009]

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