In Stealthy Flight I Pursued Her
The Red Lines of Connections – a Record of a Journey
On entering a new space, our sensitivity is directed towards a number of elements, which we gradually reduce in line with the function we find for the space. Of the four thousand things there might be to see and reflect on in a street, we end up being actively aware of only a few: the number of humans in our path, perhaps, the amount of traffic and the likelihood of rain. 1
Alain de Botton
the journey
Travelling has played a significant role in the education of the human for a long time. It has been and is undertaken for religious, economic reasons, for health and leisure, but primarily its aim is exploration, especially from the 17th century onwards. That was when travels to learn about other countries became fashionable, including the famous Grand Tour – a kind of travel which young aristocrats and European intellectuals would set out on, in order to complement their education, to gain knowledge about the world and culture, broaden their horizons, as well as develop artistic taste and acquire manners2 – as it is stated in today's major encyclopedia – the Wikipedia. Since that time, travels of various forms and nature have become an commonplace matter, they have settled in our behaviour to such an extent that following Zygmunt Bauman we speak of wanderers, tourists and vagrants as specific personality types. Sometimes we do not even have to leave home; the world made available by the media has become close and accessible, yet do we keep our curiosity fresh then, like Xavier de Maistre in Voyage Around My Room (Voyage autour de ma chambre), who began and ended his journey in the title bedroom. Therefore one should seriously ponder the words of de Botton's text quoted at the beginning: 'If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest—in all its ardour and paradoxes—than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems—that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice on whereto travel, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial...'3 It seems that these are the questions Izabella Gustowska asked herself when accomplishing the singular journey of In Stealthy Flight I Pursued Her.
It is yet another of her media tales. She based it on the material collected during the travel across the US, combined with earlier recordings. The material recorded was enriched with the one processed by the artist's memory. Here, one finds the recordings of herself, her figure, as well as fragments of films, tales and images surrounding us in the contemporary world, which are not always easy to read. It is a comprehensive, spatial-temporal installation, where light plays an important role, both within the images as well as in the world outside. Not only does it builds up the atmosphere, but also constitutes a substantial element of the unfolding tales, creates worlds, uncovers and weaves the secrets. The combination of a static image – the standstilled photography - with the moving recording, their superimposition and linking with the lines of red light requires us, the viewers to become involved. Even when we do not encounter the stopped image, the slowly moving frames are arrested in our thoughts.
The artist offers us a journey, both a spatial one and into the depths of time; a journey which is simultaneously real and takes place in our imagination. Some of the images surrounding us may be deciphered at once, some remain a mystery until the end. There appear doubts, which also evoke anxiety. A penetrating anxiety, since as we follow images/worlds, we encounter disasters – a nuclear explosion, a fallen bridge, fleeing, terrified people. We see the downfall of certain worlds, we touch the tragedy of fate. When the images are juxtaposed with the title originating from Aeschylus' Eumenides, where the author speaks of the Furies – the avengers of blood spilled, embodiments of revenge for any injustice, and thus in a way symbols of human fate and lot, as well as human pangs of conscience – which in the play transform into Eumenides – tutelary deities, then we have to pose the question: who is the message addressed to, is only the artist to be found in the centre, or every one of us? Because apart from one projection, she is present everywhere, but it is we who spin the tale, finding the threads of connections...
[...] inwardly we pant, for many a day
Toiling in chase that shall fordo the man;
For o'er and o'er the wide land have I ranged,
And o'er the wide sea, flying without wings,
Swift as a sail I pressed upon his track,
Who now hard by is crouching, well I wot,
For scent of mortal blood allures me here.4
Sometimes in our travels we are accompanied by a guide, who shows us places, encourages seeking, also on the very personal and painful plane. A good guide lets one explore on their own, without pointing to ready-made solutions. In her journey, Izabella Gustowska also had a guide: the paintings of Edward Hooper's. Fascinated with his art, she set out on her own quest of discovery of the continent. His canvases return in the prepared, ready-made frames.
America
Creating the cold, melancholic images, the American artist sought for places strictly related to travel: roads, petrol stations, hotels, trains and the sights seen from their windows, bars. His painting may be treated as a singular record of the travels across the United States. The first one, in 1925, took him from New York to New Mexico. It was followed by a series of other journeys. In fact, Hopper spent several months every year on the road, always sketching his paintings, in which he enclosed the atmosphere of loneliness and suspension. As cold, studied and immobile as frames from a film that never ends. A film which even now is being played before the viewer's eyes. A film to which Izabella Gustowska contributes, placing herself in each of the episodes. Herself from the past, from a different reality, registered simultaneously with the presented plot. Looped, seeking and sought, being there. 'She filmed passers-by on the Brooklyn Bridge (and suddenly there she was among them, and she found herself astonished by that loop in time ...).'5
Personally, when I watch the work, I cannot shake America off. Its images, so characteristic, known from numerous means of cultural diffusion point to more points of reference. Are any of them erroneous? The view of the bridge, in itself an intriguing one, is the San Francisco's Golden Gate; people stroll along the Brooklyn Bridge in New York; a woman caught by a hidden camera stays on the island of volcanoes. America is both, a real territory, where the base pictures were taken, as well as an utterly fantastic one, a land of our dreams, stored in the individual recesses of the mind. Izabella Gustowska's fascination suffuses the space, permeates our thoughts and wanders with us in the journey through culture and through life. We watch it clandestinely and follow with our eyes, we read it, only to surrender to the charm again. We co-create the film. The light penetrates us.
Tony Judt observed that our 'knowledge' concerning America is age-dependent, it is associated with our experience, external circumstances and our reading. Mine is strictly associated with Jean Baudrillard. I cannot help but recall his remarks on the greatness and fictitiousness of the USA, the loneliness of the people and the European-American difference. He wrote: 'what is thought in Europe, becomes reality in America – everything that disappears in Europe reappears in San Francisco!'6 America fascinated the thinker, at times also terrifying him as well, his remarks were never merely descriptions of a specific country, being certain cultural figures, sometimes validated through an actual encounter, and frequently only imagined earlier. This is how, years later, Tony Judt remembers his first preparations to a visit and his reactions:
America was thus intensely familiar—and completely unknown. Before coming here, I had read Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and some of the extraordinary short-story writers of the South. Between this and a diet of 1940s-era film noir, I certainly had visual images of the United States. But nothing cohered. Moreover, born like most Europeans in a country I could cross on foot in a matter of days, I had absolutely no grasp of the sheer scale and variety of the place.7
America is a fulfilment and a fiction. It is so easy to be there, even if we have not been there. After all, we have walked so many times in the streets of New York and admired the beauty of the Golden Gate... among the multiplicity of times and interweaving realities. Following, this time and yet again, the tales begun by Izabella Gustowska. Tales also through culture, from antiquity until the present day.
records
This one of the recent works by Izabella Gustowska is another ambiguous media tale. Based on actual material collected during the journey across the United States, it is a recordings of adjacent realities. Five locations from the journey, among which she situates herself and the sixth image, a singular one, departing from the others. This significant projection, which probably fuses all those featured in the work, is an image of a butterfly - a moth closed in a small, glass circle. The flutter of the wings becomes the sound of helplessness and activity at the same time. This is inability of getting out and the influence on other events. The sound accompanies us all the time as we watch the exhibition. In some cultures, the butterflies - and moth in a night butterfly - are souls. Others claim that the motion of their wings has an impact on the entire universe. Nothing, even the most remote of things, remains without an influence on the world close to us, on our lives. There are no actions without consequences. The recorded material blends with the material processed by culture and memory. Red lines of light run on the floor; in some shows the lines split onto the viewers, but the artist prefers the connection effect. All five circular projections are woven into a whole by references to the sixth – the image of the moth. There is no life without disasters, there in no one recorded history, and life consists of many fragments, a fact that Gustowska draws attention to yet again. The technological solutions employed by the artist are of great importance, as usual. Without being too blatant, they serve to build the atmosphere, and begin to fascinate on repeated reception. Why do the images assume the perfect shape of a circle? What do we actually see? We find successive frames, 'inscribed' in one another, we notice the superimposed projections. Multiple exposure, incorporation of the space of two, or more different worlds. We begin to deliberate on the manner in which this has been accomplished, only to conclude a while later that we do not have to identify the technical nuances in order to see that they are substantially valid, that they pose questions about how we record our experiences and create memories based on those. The utilised solutions reveal the presence of the past in the present. We contemplate time and the adopted manner of dividing it: past, present, future, or perhaps these are the wrong assumptions, perhaps much more of the yesterday happens simultaneously today? Perhaps these are not merely records of the fading memories... We also consider the function of the media in memory building, and thus building ourselves. Let us remember that memory does not only contain personal recollections, but also fragments of films we have seen, stories we have heard and the fantasies of others. These are also images, which often teach us other worlds, they are the eyepiece/telescope through which we watch strange continents. In this work, Gustowska's lens is Hopper's painting, her own experience and reflective being in a given place. She also wrote histories of the people she met, created their lives, just like the flaneur, who currently wanders the various worlds – the real, the virtual, the world of culture and memory.
When watching the work, being in a processed space, we surrender to the mood of ambiguous histories. We leave with red afterimage when we close our eyes, the flutter of the wings in our ears and the anxiety at heart, where will that journey, as yet unfinished, perhaps endless, lead.
In Stealthy Flight I Pursued Her... resounds in our ears. This Greek reference assumes new dimensions in the present-day, mediatised and stratified world. Who is the observer, and who is observed?
And who describes the events/spectacles happening in Her life?
Justyna Ryczek