<p>Dominika Olszowy, <em>Leucoma,</em> 2021, photo: Tomasz Koszewnik © Gdańska Galeria Miejska</p>
<p>Dominika Olszowy, <em>Leucoma,</em> 2021, photo: Tomasz Koszewnik © Gdańska Galeria Miejska</p>

No. 37: Images of Exhaustion

Managing editors: Magda Szcześniak, Krzysztof Świrek

Dominika Olszowy, Leucoma, 2021, photo: Tomasz Koszewnik © Gdańska Galeria Miejska

This issue was supported by the Film School in Łódź, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanisties, Warsaw, and Ministry of Education and Science in the framework of "Development of Academic Journals," project number RCN/SP/0698/2021/12.

Table of Contents

Introduction

  1. Images of Exhaustion

    ”Images of Exhaustion”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 37 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.37.2835

    Introduction to thematic issue on images of exhaustion. The point of departure is the distinction between tiredness and exhaustion and importance of the latter for the task of understanding contemporary social life.

    keywords: exhaustion; work; affect

Viewpoint

  1. Material Fatigue

    Jagna Lewandowska, Gizela Mickiewicz
    Jagna Lewandowska, Gizela Mickiewicz, ”Material Fatigue”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 37 (2023), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2023/37-images-of-exhaustion/material-fatigue

    Presentation of the work of a sculptor, Gizela Mickiewicz, accompanied by an essay by curator and critic, Jagna Lewandowska.

    keywords: material fatigue; sculptural matter; process; sculptural ruins; dramaturgy of erosion

Close Up

  1. Diogenes from Łomianki-Dąbrowa: Przemysław Kwiek and the Ideology of the Transformation

    Jakub Banasiak
    Jakub Banasiak, ”Diogenes from Łomianki-Dąbrowa”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 37 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2024.37.2825

    The article is the first study of Przemysław Kwiek's work from the period of postcommunist transformation. Based on a method of symptomatic reading of ideology (Slavoj Žižek), the author analyzes Kwiek's work as a repressed symptom of the transformation, a blind spot of its ideology. To do so, he uses two metaphors: kynicism and cynicism (Peter Sloterdijk), treating Kwiek as an exponent of a kynical attitude. The main thesis of the article is as follows: Kwiek's work is not a part of the canon of the Polish art of the 1990s because, as radically critical of the neoliberal shock therapy, it could not fit into the ideological framework of the epoch. Significantly, this was also true of art history, dominated by gender or identity issues typical for the transformation. The article proposes to look at Kwiek's attitude as a potentiality to complement these themes with a critique of the economic (including class) basics of transformation. The article extensively examines Kwiek's work, placing it within such a critical project.

    keywords: Przemysław Kwiek; postcommunist transformation; kynicism; cynicis; ideology; symptomatic reading

  2. Immediacy and the Imaginary

    Anna Kornbluh
    Anna Kornbluh, ”Immediacy and the Imaginary”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 37 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.37.2821

    Polish translation of a chapter from Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso 2024). The author explores relationship between immediacy style of contemporary culture and psychoanalytical notion of imaginary.

    keywords: imaginary; immediacy; affect; late capitalism; image circulation; algorithm; imagined real

  3. Misery and Blob. The Work of Adam Kozicki and Bartosz Zaskórski in the Context of Generational Images of Exhaustion

    Aleksy Wójtowicz
    Aleksy Wójtowicz, ”Misery and Blob”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 37 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.37.2847

    Even before 2015, critics were pointing to a conservative turn in Polish contemporary art. The rising dominance of non-realist efforts, especially in painting, prompted a shift in reception toward the assessment of new art through the prism of the influence of being “tired of reality,” conformism toward the market, and indifference to socio-political realities. This essay interrogates the image of young artists entrenched in critical circles – especially the usefulness of the category of “generation,” and the validity of an ethical opposition between realism and surrealism. Against this background, the text examines the figures of Adam Kozicki and Bartosz Zaskórski, two artists considered part of the “fatigued generation.” Their “self-portraits in an extended field” and their interest in the transforming body directly relate to the late-capitalist condition, to which they propose an “off-modern” strategy as a potential solution.

    keywords: conservative turn; art; painting; art criticism; generation; late capitalism; realism; surrealism; Adam Kozicki; Bartosz Zaskórski

  4. Beckett’s Image of Exhaustion: The Late Television Plays

    Adrian Switzer
    Adrian Switzer, ”Beckett’s Image of Exhaustion”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 37 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.37.2815

    The article presents Samuel Beckett’s television plays as images of exhaustion. It focuses on Quad 1 + 2, Ghost Trio, …but the clouds…, and Nacht und Träume, which were all aired in England on the BBC and in Germany on SDR in the late-1970s and early-1980s. Exhaustion as a creative state is spontaneous, fecund and unprecedented in the forms it creates; seeming impossibilities overflow the exhausted image. Creative exhaustion also differs from fatigue, though the latter is a condition of the former. With their internal mechanics of vacuum-sealed cathode rays, electromagnets and phosphorescent glass screens, analog television sets were perfectly suited in the mid- to late-20th century to present images of exhaustion. Light radiates out from the inner core of sets. Electrically charged particles give off photons, which light the television screen from within. Beckett’s television plays are images of exhaustion as surreal, overabundant presentations of impossible forms and unprecedented events.

    keywords: Beckett; television plays; exhaustion; Gilles Deleuze; analog television

  5. Body Contracts. The enthusiasm economy and the censoring of exhaustion

    Arkadiusz Półtorak, Tomasz Borys, Agata Gaik, Julia Król, Magdalena Niedzielska, Daniel Oleksy, Zuzanna Piwowar, Julian Skowronek, Marta Soczyńska, Martyna Zawada
    Arkadiusz Półtorak, Tomasz Borys et al., ”Body Contracts”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 37 (2023), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2023/37-images-of-exhaustion/body-contracts

    The text is a partial summary of the performative project Umowy o ciało (Body Contracts), which the authors carried out as part of a workshop at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University. The aim of the project was to create 'honest contracts' that would provide realistic representations of exploitation in the precarious and project-based labor market. The documents were created on the basis of sociological, autoethnographic and art-based research by five working groups focusing on the situation of dancers, servers, nightclub promoters, cultural animators and volunteers in the cultural industry. In the text we present the results of the project, highlighting two important observations from our research. The first relates to the affective dimension of the activities studied, requiring workers to be intensely involved in relationships with other people, to continuously perform work readiness and to show emotional attachment to their work. The second observation concerns yet another pressure accompanying these demands – namely, to hide signs of physical and mental fatigue. In our view, the latter expectation is nowadays amounting to a systemic form of affective censorship, founded primarily on cultural perceptions and mores, but also sanctioned by social dispositifs such as civil law.

    keywords: enthusiasm economy; precarious labor; affective censorship

Panorama

  1. Peripherals. Visual Utopias of Productivity Without Boundaries and Cyberpunk Images of Exhaustion

    Jerzy Stachowicz
    Jerzy Stachowicz, ”Peripherals”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 37 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.37.2818

    In the article, I examine peripheral images of remote work depicted in the movie Sleep Dealer and the series Peripheral. I use cyberpunk cinema to attempt to diagnose contemporary, real-world issues arising around the concept of remote work, especially its dark sides. I pay particular attention to what happens on the peripheries of the globalized, networked world. There, where the marginalized, invisible remote worker is separated by an interface like a slave or servant on Thomas Jefferson's estate, their exhaustion and burnout are hidden behind the image of the machine-program. Futuristic attempts to transcend the "traditional work imaginarium" raise the question of whether, in the case of a peripheral device, the worker does not become objectified (dehumanized)?

    keywords: cyberpunk; remote work; science fiction; peripheries; peripheral; neoliberalism

  2. Per monstra ad astra? Diana Lelonek's Wasteplants Atlas

    Paweł Drabarczyk vel Grabarczyk
    Paweł Drabarczyk vel Grabarczyk , ”Per monstra ad astra?”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 37 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.37.2790

    The article is an interpretation of Diana Lelonek's projects: the Center for the Living Things and the Wasteplants Atlas accompanying the activities of this para-institution. It is an attempt to understand the botanical and artifactual entities, as they are presented in the Atlas, as hybrids, primarily in the context of history and criticism of modern reason (with emphasis on the role of compendia, atlases and cabinets of curiosities). The author analyses the formula of the atlas from the perspective of Georges Didi-Huberman's thought (“Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science”). He assumes that the practice of the Center of Living Things characterizes a tension defined by Didi-Huberman after Aby Warburg’s notions astra and monstra. Diana Lelonek's initiatives are seen here as an attempt to broaden awareness, and perhaps even a preliminary sketch of knowledge (astra) about the anthropocenic reality. The artist's desire to question the distinction of culture/nature is also interpreted in the context of Alexander von Humbotdt's pioneering holistic view of nature - from this perspective Center for Living Things may be seen as an artistic update of Humboldt's postulates in the Anthropocene era.  

    keywords: hybrids; waste; plants; Wasteplants; atlas; teratology; anthropocene

Perspectives

  1. The Hostile Proximity of Classes: Margaret Hillenbrand in Conversation with Magda Szcześniak

    Margaret Hillenbrand, Magda Szcześniak
    Margaret Hillenbrand, Magda Szcześniak, ”The Hostile Proximity of Classes”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 37 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.37.2811

    A conversation with Margaret Hillenbrand around her latest book On the Edge. Feeling Precarious in China (2023) devoted to representations of precarious life of "the underclass" in contemporary China.

    keywords: precarity; subaltern classes; China; zombie-citizenship

  2. Timing Modernity: Factory, Prison, Narrative

    Elaine Freedgood
    Elaine Freedgood , ”Timing Modernity: Factory, Prison, Narrative”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 37 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.37.2808

    This essay explores how regimes of time-discipline have operated—and met with forms of resistance—across three critical sites of modernity: the factory, narrative, and the prison. Through a historical discussion of factory labor and drawing on E. P. Thompson’s analysis of time and work-discipline, the essay examines the industrial capitalist methods of timing that underwrote workers’ exploitation and large-scale theft of life and health. Readings of modernist authors show how the non-plots of modernist narrative push, within a limited sphere, against the imposition of progressive, developmental time. Finally, the essay examines the empty time of incarceration—modern time-discipline through a mirror darkly. In their prison writings, Black revolutionaries such as George Jackson wrested with the reality of a stolen futurity, illuminating empty time with liberatory political philosophy and anger.

    keywords: Time; labor; work discipline; E. P. Thompson; factory; modernism; modernity; the novel, prison; George Jackson; revolutionary writing

Snapshots

  1. Demonstrating the Spirit of Workers' Culture: the Links Between Sport and the Arts

    Maciej Duklewski
    Maciej Duklewski, ”Demonstrating the Spirit of Workers' Culture”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 37 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.37.2795

    Critical reading of Przemysław Strożek's, Picturing the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads. Modernist and Avant-Garde Engagement with Sport in Central Europe and the USSR, 1920–1932, Routledge, New York 2023.

    keywords: workers; sport; avant-garde; art; modernism; Central Europe

  2. Finding Words

    Piotr Kosiewski
    Piotr Kosiewski, ”Finding Words”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 37 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.37.2797

    Review of the collection of Ewa Mikina's texts entitled Słów brak. Teksty z lat 1991–2012, wybór i redakcja: Marysia Lewandowska i Jakub Gawkowski. Galeria Miejska Arsenał, Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, Poznań–Łódź 2023. 

    keywords: Ewa Mikina; art criticism

  3. Moï Ver at the Museum of Warsaw

    Małgorzata Maria Grąbczewska
    Małgorzata Maria Grąbczewska, ”Moï Ver at the Museum of Warsaw”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 37 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.37.2826

    A critical and contextual analysis of the exhibition of a photographer Moï Ver at the Museum of Warsaw set on a broad socio-political background.

    keywords: Moï Ver; photography; Jews; avant-garde; Bauhaus; Zionism; Palestine