Phlegethon-Milczenie, 2005 Color print, still from self-shot video. Courtesy Cisneros Fontenals Art Foundation, Miami.
Zamek Krolewski (Royal Castle), Warsaw, summer 1945, annonimous photographer
Interview with Monika Weiss by Julia P. Herzberg based on biographical sources for Poza, exhibition catalogue to be published by Real Art Ways in 2007. Curator Marek Bartelik.
Body-when, where, why, sources for the body? How does the body convey meaning?
JPH: Would you describe your performance in the video Phlegethon-Milczenie?
MW: For about a year I collected books by German authors printed in Germany before 1945, then arranged them in the form of an octagonal floor sculpture, a process that took about eight weeks. Using a camera suspended from the ceiling above the sculpture, I videotaped my body lying on the open books in different positions. I returned to the installation several times during the two-month exhibition, videotaping my body as I moved slowly from a fetal position to being stretched out across the pages of the books while drawing lines around my body with graphite and charcoal sticks.
JPH: What motivated you to choose a three-part composition?
MW: The three-part structure of the video and sound is analogous to a typical musical composition, particularly of the Romantic period. The first part focuses on my body moving across the pages of the books, interspersed with brief glimpses of fire from the burning pages of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, accompanied by the sound of its burning. The second part of the video continues focusing on my performing body as I move across the pages of the books, while close-up scenes of the burning book become gradually longer, allowing the viewer to see parts of the text. The sound of fire in the second part is combined with voices of German speakers reading passages from poems by Paul Celan. In the third part of the video, I reversed the composition with a long scene of the burning book which I intercut with brief views of my body moving across the pages. Those two elements-burning and moving -are accompanied by a vocal chorus that I composed based on my recording of the male operatic soprano Anthony Roth Costanzo singing selected passages a capella from Salve Regina by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and Joseph Haydn's Oratorio.
JPH: What was it about Paul Celan's poetry that appealed to you?
MW: I am drawn toward his repetitive, condensed minimal use of language that is somewhat restrained, even though he is a powerful lyricist. The experience of the Holocaust is a defining force in his poetry and his use of the German language, with which he had emotional and intellectual conflict because it was the language of the oppressor. Paul Celan (pen name of Paul Antschel) was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernauti, Bukovina, then part of Romania. He and his family were put into a concentration camp where his parents died. In Phlegethon-Milczenie I asked German speakers to read fragments of his last poems, known for their cryptic, fractured, and monosyllabic character, bearing comparison to the music of Anton von Webern [Austrian composer, 1883-1945]. My own voice is also briefly included in the video reading a few words of a Polish translation of Celan's Todesfuge.
JPH: Tell us about the role of music in your background when as a child you heard your mother playing piano everyday.
MW: I grew up in a small apartment in Warsaw where I spent a lot of my childhood listening to the piano, and being physically very close to it, while my mother was practicing. I have experienced being with music on a daily basis, and it has become a primary language to me.
JPH: Would you talk about your later training at the Warsaw Conservatory?
MW: My time spent at the Warsaw Conservatory [1974-1984] were years of both sounds and silence: I was at the conservatory every day, generally from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and practiced piano for several hours. We were all required to be silent when not practicing, so I would walk down the corridors listening to that silence and also to the sounds of different instruments that could be heard through the double doors of the practice rooms.
JPH: When I curated your installation Leukos-Early Morning Light at the Remy Toledo Gallery in New York early in 2005, I was impressed by the importance of music in your art. In that project, similar to Phlegethon-Milczenie you collaborated with the same male soprano opera vocalist who sang passages from Purcell, Arvo Part, and J. S. Bach, among others. You selected those specific passages from classical compositions you know well, then altered them to create a new composition. The passages in Leukos convey a sense of lamentation. What do you feel they convey in Phlegethon-Milczenie?
MW: In this composition the rhythmic sounds of the burning book together with the singing voices engulf the spectator. I was hoping to convey a sense of shimmering and a sensation of whispering and crackling to suggest the play of time and memory.
JPH: Would you elaborate on the process you employed to achieve the syncopated rhythms?
MW: In the last choruslike part of the soundtrack for Phlegethon-Milczenie, I used the high-pitched voice of the male soprano, whose gender is not revealed to the listener, to create electronically a new composition of overlapping multiple voice tracks relating to the movement of the flames. I recorded the singer's voice twelve times and overlayed the tracks in irregular intervals, creating a feeling of lamentation and suggesting the rhythm of the flames. The musical lines are no longer clearly discernable, they are like a web of vertically drawn lines in space, corresponding to the light marks drawn on the pages of the books. In my work I explore the important relationship between drawing and sound/music, focusing on the time-based and rhythmic qualities of drawing and the spatial and sculptural properties of music/sound. Both relate to the language of the body.
JPH: How does music affect the meaning of Phlegethon-Milczenie?
MW: There is a counterpoint quality of sound and image in this work. I try to create a polyphonic arrangement of image, action, and sound. For instance, I combined images of my body with the sound of pages burning and images of fire with the sound of voices.
JPH: Would you discuss the historical lessons you learned about the Nazi occupation in Poland and how those lessons affected your growing up during the communist regime?
MW: I grew up under two regimes, the political/military and the religious, which was also politically involved. Both had an impact on my understanding of language and history. I was aware of the power of authority to change your understanding of the world. But I was also exposed to the power of expression, especially poetic expression, which can hint at hidden or repressed realities. When I was a little girl of four or five, I saw the rubble from the Warsaw royal castle, which reminded me of death. Another lesson was learning that my grandfather had been killed in Dachau when his wife-my grandmother-was pregnant with my mother. He was a reserve officer in the Polish army when he volunteered to work in the Gdansk post office. After the Nazi occupation of Gdansk, most of the postal workers were killed; the rest were taken to concentration camps. My grandfather had little chance of survival because his name was on Hitler's as well as Stalin's extermination list of Polish patriots, intellectuals, and officers considered potential threats to the regime. A year later, my grandfather's officer's coat, soaked in blood, was sent back to my grandmother from Dachau.
JPH: Phlegethon-Milczenie addresses notions of silence and of being silenced, and by extension issues of absence and disappearance. Please elaborate on the aesthetic resolutions you arrived at to express these historical conditions.
MW: According to Merleau-Ponty, the body is the ultimate and only space we have, which must be addressed, and it is the material I work with as an artist. In "Time Being," an essay on my work by Guy Brett, he stated that artists in the Chilean Avanza movement in the 1970s "developed forms of visual-literary performance under the nose of the Pinochet dictatorship. Vulnerable to arrest and torture, the body was seen as the most real and honest site for expression." I believe in the poetic strength of the body and its ability to resonate as language. I have developed different ways of "listening" to layers of the past -one of them is to lie down with my eyes closed on the books, as in Phlegethon-Milczenie, or on dirt and sickles in a twelfth-century castle, as in Anamnesis (2006). For that piece, I asked local farmers to cut grass using sickles and local women to sew large sheets of muslin together. Then I lay on the cut grass covered by the fabric and surrounded by the sickles and drew the outline of my body. The use of sickles was inspired by a poem of Krzysztof Baczynski, a Polish poet killed by Nazis in 1944 at the age of twenty-three. In his poem Deszcze he juxtaposes images of falling rain and sickles dropping to the earth-a stark metaphor for the violence of war.
JPH: When did you begin focusing on the body as a vehicle for artistic expression?
MW: Since the mid-1990s I began using my body directly in my projects, either in the form of performative actions-the inhabiting of space or an object in the presence of others-or mediated through video images filmed during private, solitary actions. This development in my work comes directly from the experience of drawing-the awareness of touching and pressing my body against paper or canvas, leaving a mark with my hand.
While I was working on the installation Koiman at Space 1181 Art Center in Atlanta, Georgia (1997-1998), I made a sculpture from 800 pounds of cast-concrete that resembled a 14th-century baptismal font I knew from the cathedral in Wroclaw, Poland. Once I made that sculpture, I began to imagine how my body would fit into it. In imagining that, I drew the image of the sculpture on paper with my body inside it. Eventually I made hundreds of drawings. Between Koiman (1998) and my first immersion in another sculpture that I made for the Ennoia series (2001), I created several videos based on private performances in which I immersed myself in fluids-water in Abiding (1999) and milk in Milk Series (2000).
JPH: In your performative work, you attempt to express the body's fragility as well as make a connection between the body and language. You perform the body as if it were a delicate vessel instead of a conquering one. In your view the body can be as expressive as prose, poetry, or theatre. In Phlegethon-Milczenie your body lies on hundreds of open books. Would you further elaborate how language, text, and etymology are so important in your work in general, but especially in Phlegethon-Milczenie?
MW: For me there is a crucial connection between language and speech, which results from an attempt to create meaning and the act of drawing or composing music. There is a collapsing or collision that occurs in that process. The collision relates not only to the physical presence of our body in a given space but, even more so, to the attempt to create a meaning that transcends the physical presence, to create a form that overcomes the immediate experience. Language is the first raw attempt to create meaning. It can be a scream, gesture, word, cry, whisper, song, poem, an object, or a mark on a surface. Language fails to define reality, yet in that attempt it creates a new energy or quality, just like the act of drawing. In Phlegethon-Milczenie my silhouette becomes a moving sign/form, it becomes its own language. When I think of language and words, I also think of paper, its humbleness and the act of writing on it, drawing on it, making it wet. I think of books, especially of the smell of old books. Thoughts about my father arise-a retired journalist and unpublished writer whose books filled my childhood home. The books I am lying on in Phlegethon are part of my west European heritage. I have read most of them in Polish translation because I never learned German; hence I am lying on a foreign medium.
In her recent essay, Katherine Carl, curator of the Drawing Center, noted that my "focus on the materiality and tactility of the books calls to mind the method of dialectical materialism practiced by the Frankfurt School and the mysticism of Walter Benjamin in particular to combat fascist ideology. In their thinking, the bodily, sensory response to material and form was an effective counter to the Enlightenment's total embracing of thought, reason and mind over body."
