IZABELLA GUSTOWSKA

SHE-ONA media story

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ONA –  SHE. Media Story

 

'The world has become both talkative and silent,
populated and dissected.'

In this world I’m looking for a woman. In museums, concerts, and shopping centres... I spy on her, both anonymous and recognized in macro close-ups of the camera. In things she might have lost, in films on YouTube she might have watched, or in words she might have said... It is SHE who becomes an 'artwork'. It is SHE who is an avatar in the Second Life.

Perhaps we will find her in the surveillance recording...
We look for her because in a while the world will fall into pieces...
And when SHE disappears, 'wild cats will go out into the streets, bridges will collapse, the sun will shine brighter...'

Who is that woman - SHE?
Such a commentary was included in the first note.
Surely it must be-a Woman - SHE.

Not finally identified. It is she who I fished out from the crowd celebrating the 2006 New Year's Eve shown in a TV report from the Fifth Avenue in New York, next I saw her in Hamburger Bahnhof at the Flick Collection exhibition, her ginger hair attracted my attention on the Champs Elysees in 2007. I saw her running through the Venice's Dorsoduro on one June morning, and watching Trisha Brown's realization at the Documenta in Kassel in 2007.

SHE was the girl I detected with my camera in the Flash Mob crowd in the Old Brewery in Poznań. It was her voice I heard in a Chanel commercial broadcast on TVN, She was the masked blonde in the mask from the You Tube video, and she was also the SHE in Charles Aznavour's song... Her name was certainly Antonina, but a moment later it was Vicky or April from Jose Carlos Somoza`s novel. Once she was 17 - just like Wanda who was walking her dog in the Old Slaughterhouse, then she turned into a 23 - year old Dominika, a student of the Performative Activity Studio at the Poznań Academy of Fine Arts, to finally become a 24-year old Klara from the above mentioned book.

Once She was avid for life and seen kissing in the shopping centre, and then She turned into a sad and banal 40-year-old listening to jazz in the Blue Note Club; She was also a canvas, a zero, signing a contract with F&W Co. from Amsterdam, and She looked like Vanessa Beecroft`s models, and eventually SHE turned into a mad woman of Ever Is Over All, Pipilotti Rist...

If I had not filmed all these women, I would never have believed they were so intensive, so tangible and so real. With such a belief l brought them back to the renewed - and this time virtual world.

Media Story is not the spectacles dissected theatricality, but rather the spied out life which is fragmentary, chaotic and insubordinate to any stage principles. Because this is not theatre. It is the spectator who arranges his own media story from fragments, films, texts and surveillance recordings. There are no acts there, but rather spaces becoming open to the audience, where an astute observer can find the same, or similar women - THEM. It might be a girl riding a bike, or identical triplets - Kasia, Ewa and Magda, two roller skating students, or a stranger palying accordion. Because it is HE - the spectator - who can omit uninteresting images or comments, he can move back to wait for a gesture, word or face of the stranger. HE will become the reconstructor, HE can create his own media story, even when he is spied on by the camera which makes him part of media reality.

In these repetitions of repetitions SHE is concealed. SHE – like a Philips Sonicare toothbrush whose parts travel around the world, to be finally composed into a whole and returned to the shipping place in Snoqualmie near Seattle. However, in all her fragments, SHE, put into various real and virtual spaces, is commented by a man. HE is in love with her, HE spies on her, HE signs a contract with her.

Jean Baudrillard, falsely prophesying the end of art, wrote:

The end […] brings with it the collapse of reality into hyperrealism, the meticulous            reduplication of the real, preferably through another reproductive medium such as advertising or photogrpahy. Through reproduction from one medium into another the real becomes volatile, it becomes the allegory of death, but it also draws strength from its own destruction, becoming the real for its own sake, a fetishism of the lost object which is no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denegation and its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal.[1]

Izabella Gustowska

Ona - She. Media Story
Stara Rzeźnia, Poznań, 23-28.06.2008.
10 spaces, projections, LCD, CCTV cameras

 

In the work were used:

Texts: Jean Baudrillard, Roger-Pol Droit, Jose Carlos Somoza, 'Niezbędnik inteligenta', Polityka, No. 10 andNo. 50, 2008, Ps 17,8 and other dispersed texts.

Images and sounds: quotations from the artist’s private archives, from YouTube films, films, chronicles and other sources, and different soundtracks which were copied, overheard or heard...

Female extras: friends, close and far acquaintances, strangers.

Collaboration: Maciej Ćwiek, Adam Draber, Cezary Ostrowski, Janusz Tatarkiewicz and others

Production: Malta International Theatre Festival Foundation.