Untitled
/3
- Untitled
- 2005
- video, color, sound
- 25min, 30sec
It is not a film, it is not an installation, nor is it a performance or a criticism. But this untitled “situationistic” work does deal with all of these media, constructing a modest quasi-narrative format consisting of set of photographs shown in time sequences, one after the other, and accompanied by the artist’s own commentary. The images are documentations or artifacts of the situations, performances and mini-events that Cezary Bodzianowski staged in different places (e.g. Lódz, Kraków, Warsaw) and at different points in time (from the 1990s to 2005). This work might be viewed as typical of Bodzianowski due to his own appearances in various specially arranged interventions in reality. Bodzianowski, well known as a “master of small events,” “master of situations,” or “master of the perfectly neutral expression,” presents himself here in extremely normal or absurd venues, and in extremely normal or truly absurd roles (both very public and very personal or intimate). Interestingly, some of the images and situations in Untitled include the creator’s off-screen commentary in English, while others are uncommented, simply left silent. The first image, which is of the latter type, presents a faded and withered tulip flower in a modern green vase. Thereafter, a “silent” series of tulips in various colors and states of being makes consistent appearances at intervals throughout the 25 minutes of this unusual slideshow. The voiceover by the “narrator” starts from the third image, where Bodzianowski explains: “One time I visited Kraków because they had Impressionists’ paintings exhibition, and I stood two hours in a queue…” [sic]. This 2001 event consisted in waiting his turn in the long line in front of the National Museum in Kraków and then allowing the last person in line to take his place—at the front of the line. We can also see and hear later on how he wanted to beat everybody in a chess tournament, as well as about the project devoted in which Romanian gymnastics champion Nadia Comaneci staging herself on a tree with a ball. And coming back to the private: he also shows us and talks about how he constructed a tent in his house; about his wife Monika’s pregnancy, which he parlayed into painting on her belly portraying a globe for his “globetrotter” son, whom he imagined as Columbus; or about just simply being the bodyguard for the “Polish golden autumn.” So now, a decade after Untitled was made, we can apparently learn a lot about Poland and Bodzianowski himself. B.P.