Piotr Jaros «caviar lady»
Piotr Jaros «caviar lady»
The current exhibition of works by Piotr Jaros at Tony Wuethrich's Kabinett in Basel is the artist's first substantial gallery show outside of his native Poland since a considerably long time.
Born in 1965, Jaros made a strong appearance in the 90s and quickly established himself as one of the most important figures in Polish contemporary art at that time. The early 90s were the era of turbo-capitalism in Poland: transition to free market produced new patterns of social behavior, poverty for many and excessive lifestyles for those who were able to adapt fast. The previously unknown career opportunities became available after the great transformation, which was initiated by the so called "roundtable negotiations" between the last communist government and representatives of political opposition, which resulted in the first free election that was clearly won by the candidates of opposition, in Summer 1989. Work for advertising business, television and other creative industries were in high esteem among the young people at the beginning of their professional career. But it was also a formative period for the entire generation of artists who constituted the lively art scenes in larger Polish cities, including Warsaw, Cracow, Gdansk and Wroclaw.
In Warsaw, Miroslaw Balka created sculptures that stemmed from critique of Polish Catholicism, on the one hand, and that, on the other hand, examined the human body in its universal, existential almost religious dimension. Also in Warsaw, Zbigniew Libera developed his own brand of video and installation art, focusing on the body repressed by social conventions and state apparatus. Another, more performative mode of working with the body, elaborating its productive deficiencies, has become a trademark of a group of slightly younger artists, who all graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Art's Faculty of Sculpture headed by the sculptor and performance artist Grzegorz Kowalski: among them Pawel Althamer, Katarzyna Kozyra and Artur Zmijewski.
Next to the five artists mentioned, who made their names in the 90s and are all more or less internationally recognized at present – Balka, Libera, Althamer, Kozyra and Zmijewski – Piotr Jaros occupies a special and independent position. Contrary to the five who have been living for most of the time in Warsaw, which is the buzzing centre of Poland, with all features of metropolitan life, Jaros has been always based in Cracow, in the South of Poland. Compared with modern and fast accelerating city of Warsaw, Cracow is the beautiful old town, where relatively conservative attitudes prevail and contemplative, somewhat escapist way of being is the artists' favoured choice. Intellectual life concentrates in cellars of mediaeval houses – in clubs and cafes that know little difference between the night and day. Cracow dwells in the past, longing for the grandeur it used to have as a capital of Poland – the function it lost to Warsaw already long time ago, which is still the reason for a certain antagonism felt between the two cities.
In the 90s, Jaros participated regularly in group exhibitions both international (such as Manifesta 1, Rotterdam, 1996; After the Wall, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1999) and alongside with the leading young Polish artists (New I's for New Years, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 1995) as well as he had a number of solo shows (including the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, 1995; Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 1996). Like many artists in Poland who made their debut in the early nineties, he continued to work against the scarcity of institutional and private support for contemporary art in the late 90s and after 2000, when the new generation of artists – mostly painters – entered the stage, leaving hardly any space for more refined, less spectacular work. But Jaros endured and kept making work in more domestic, handy format: video, drawing, collage and small, model-like sculptures – all of these media are present in the current show. The year 2008 saw his comeback in the series of presentations under a common title Eurogum organized by Barbara Steiner, the Director of the renowned Galerie für Zeitgennössische Kunst in Leipzig. He also had a survey show House and Work (2007) at Galeria Kronika in Bytom (Silesia) followed by the acquisition of his works by the Muzeum Sztuki (Museum of Art) in Lodz, Poland's oldest and most important collection of modern and contemporary art.
In his works, Piotr Jaros has shown keen interest in the fast-changing notion of labour: the growing importance of creative and intellectual activity, accompanied by demise of manual work. Some of Jaros' characters are workers, but the nature of their occupation is not clearly defined, as if the work could exist in a pure state, beyond the results it is meant to produce. Another part of the artist's cast of characters seems to belong to the sphere of business in its cheesy, lackluster version: the apathetic hostesses, tacky third-world executives aspiring to the first world, the wannabe-famous of all kinds, practicing erudite idleness. In Jaros' videos, typical protagonists are mysterious individuals who speak on behalf of shady organizations, syndicates and make-believe corporations. A conspiracy theory assumes that forces that are beyond our control, or even perception, exert their influence in all areas of our life and in effect, rule us. The conspiracy theory is a flipside of capitalist organization of life – controlling both the work and leisure time – that is similarly omnipresent today but mostly taken for granted as we grow up believing that this is simply how things are. "Caviar Lady" (2010), Jaros' recent 16-minute digital video, displays all characteristics of the artist's style and his typical preoccupation with the unusual, socially dysfunctional subjects, ritualized behaviors and esoteric knowledge. Piotr Jaros introduces four characters, two women and a two men, delivering monologues to the camera, in three languages – an middle aged man of experience who is not an English native speaker, but perhaps an Eastern European, a blonde young Russian woman, an older woman speaking German, and a young businessman type speaking American English without a foreign accent. This cast of multi-lingual characters is filmed against the backdrop of what seems a nouveau-riche residence or perhaps a hotel interior. The protagonists may be connected, but the exact nature of their relationship remains enigmatic. They speak and assume heavily stylized poses, in various configurations, sometimes individually and sometimes in duos, staging the consecutive scenes as small rituals. The subject matter varies from person to person but the fantasy and corresponding fear of power seem to be the leitmotifs of the statements: the young Russian unveils her dream to establish a corporation "in major cities" (an advertisement of sorts, handwritten on a bed sheet spread on the floor, lists "Skidan Corporation - Moscow, Dubai, Tokio, London, New York, Milano"), the middle-aged man curses the obscure "lawyers", who can bring doom to everyone. There is no resolution and no culmination, the film unravels as series of isolated tableaux and ends with an image of a blown off, smoking candle, as if a strange ceremony came to an end.
The exhibition also includes objects, drawings and collages. They can be understood as studies or diary entries, a line of work made in parallel to film narratives that remain the core of Piotr Jaros' new and recent work.
Basel, in October 2010, Adam Szymczyk
