THE CASE OF ANTONINA L....
The Legend-Shrouded Woman who Never Existed. On Przypadek Antoniny L...
[The Case of Antonina L...]
The notion of 'przypadek' (English: chance/accident or case) defines unforeseeable events and phenomena, as well as a person representing a phenomenon or characterised by a certain trait. 'Przypadek' heralds a 'more', an initiation, or perhaps even a sensation. The camouflaged name precludes complete identification, spawning conjectures and suggesting speculations instead. Incompleteness, and at the same time concreteness of the title becomes a narrative form on its own, since as Barbara Hardy wrote 'We dream in narrative, day-dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative. In order to live, we make up stories about others, and ourselves, about the personal as well as the social past and future.'1 However, that 'more' does not guarantee anything complete, but only fragments we are going to see in the clearances, wandering in many directions of a complex narrative. Not all narratives yield to being accommodated on paper; not always may they be enclosed in some form, simply because they are in a constant motion, because they come in excess, and each thread seems equally important. The multiplication of themes and leaving signs is characteristic of Izabella Gustowska's art; it is her private ritual, her everyday discovery of the world.
In the rich iconography which 'is derived from the artist's personal life, the texts and representations from the history of culture, as well as, from the sphere of contemporary media'2 we find many women: in images, reflections, names, desires; perhaps Antonina L is one of them... Even if we doubt her presence, we shall never be certain she does not exist, and this is what makes The Case of Antonina L so fascinating.
When looking for traces of Antonina, one has to return to Gustowska's earlier projects. There, the character appears on several occasions: for the first time in the installation Moment I - Antonina (1990),3 and after many years as Antonina de Lodi, who took part in the Art Fairs in Poznań (2005).4 There is even a reproduction of her work in the catalogue, a small picture of a young girl, her face covered by glasses and a hood, with a short biographical note. We also learn about the place she might inhabit. The Room of Antonina assembles more than we expect to see – a vortex of found-footage as traces of her (?) desires and dreams, preferences and fears. Further than that there is only guesswork, while our curiosity and the desire to find the one we do not know intensifies equally vehemently as the desire to find the woman in red from the exhibition She-Ona. Media story (2008). Izabela Kowalczyk wrote:
The audience would find out about this mysterious character already before they entered the Old Slaughterhouse building. A male voice repeatedly spoke mantra-like words about a search for a certain woman. The narrator had fallen in love with her, remembering only that she wore something red, before she ran away, disappeared in the crowd of other figures.5
Perhaps SHE is Antonina? In the text accompanying the exhibition, the artist asks:
Who is that woman, that SHE? [...] Not finally identified [...] 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 [...].6
The never-ending speculation devises Antonina, in equal measure known and unknown, remote and yet close – she is a vanishing point before our eyes which constantly eludes us, it is always there in front of us, within a hand's reach. The sole certainty is that just as with many other themes in Gustowska's work, she is to be found by following the signs, collecting them and assembling them into one's own story.7 Then the 'przypadek' changes into a matter of the world suspended between fiction and reality, a world of revelation and disappointment, a world in which we never go in the same direction.
Is Antonina a character of the 'collective' identity, or rather, paraphrasing Derrida's notion of 'identification' – the 'identified', because, as the philosopher wrote, 'an identity is never given, received, or attained; only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures', assuming however, that the one who writes [an autobiographic anamnesis], 'should know how to say I'.8 Hence identification is a 'return to oneself' through culture, politics, religion, but also art and literature. With Gustowska, the process may be discerned in earlier works, where there appears a distinct theme of self-creation.9 Most often, identification takes place in unexpected moments of existence, out of the need to confront one's own subjectivity, as in the series Relative Similarities, Floating or in Sources. As the artist said, 'the element of personal reflection is of paramount significance; in every situation, that element marks that to which I refer: be it the figure of Salome, Judith, or Mary Magdalene – it is a search for identity, as it were.'10 Paradoxically, seeking herself translates into signs being left by the artists, in the subsequent, invoked and referenced heroines. This is clearly visible in the work Multiple Portrait (Akumulatory 2 Gallery, Poznań, 1985) which, as Gustowska wrote: 'compels me to the great courage of speaking point-blank. I combine my own texts with those of Sylvia Plath, Ingeborg Bachmann and Diana Arbus. In those mixed texts, I hide the truths I fear to admit are mine. I risk balancing on the verge of someone else's and my own life, I gain more and more courage.'11 This singular encounter, suspended between reality and fiction, was a search for analogies in the biographies of these women and an attempt to define one's own 'duality' through a dialogue of the artist with herself duplicated in the video-reflections, and through the proximity of other women. The artist made use of their texts, placing them next to her own. However, the nature of that use was not sentimental; it was not signing one's name under a biography of another but, as the artist wrote, situating oneself 'continually facing questions: what is true, what is false, what has happened, what might happen?'12 In that very period, the need to go 'beyond images, mirror reflections' and replacing them with the desire to 'save the moment' make their first appearance in Gustowska's art.13 The artist emphasized that there 'are issues which cannot be accommodated within a representation',14 therefore the concreteness of Antonina will offer no explanation, that is why she is a 'case'. In this perspective, all earlier and later incarnations of Gustowska may equally well be Antonina: it may be the little girl from Moment II (1990), which appears and with whom the artist identifies, writing subsequently in the author's commentary: 'the mature woman is me, and other known and unknown, my past and future images, the real, earthly women and those who stop halfway, and the brave ones, who try to rise above everything'. Or perhaps she will be among the whispering girls of nymph-like beauty, or other, the unrecognised in the work Summer Time.15
The strategy of reflection and dissolution employed by Gustowska not only with regard to her image but also to the subsequent heroines is a form of leaving signs, which Gilles Deleuze described as the fundamental strategy in Proust's In Search of Lost Time.16 And just as in that endless tale of potential events, concrete things, objects of entities send out signs to be read and interpreted, so the figure of Antonina acquires individuality through 'accumulated signs', not by virtue of concreteness, completeness of her image. Recognising the signs reveals their meaning and discloses a 'private secret'. As Deleuze put it: 'the sign's meaning appears, yielding to us the concealed object – Combray for the madeleine, young girls for the steeples, Venice for the cobblestones...'17
Identifying Antonina with a specific person always carries us outside the centre, to the outskirts. Thus the narrative comes full circle, spins in such a way that the principle of traditional logic disappears, and the aftermath of causes and effects is inconceivable.18 Not reaching the centre, we go in circles in something which resembles a rhizome, which Deleuze and Guattari defined as a phenomenon without beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, between entities– an intermezzo, with its chief principles being the principle of combination and diversity, multiplicity, marked intervals and the principle of 'cartography' and 'decalcomania'.19 Assuming therefore, that the rhizome is a structure of endless connections and countless signs, we will always strike the right one or 'another', equally interesting thread, we will always arrive at 'some' place eventually. The assumptions we have made at the outset do not have to come true at the moment we deem final, since liberated narrative may freely go in different directions and in different spaces, manifest itself in a fragmentary fashion, abandoning its own threads, spinning new ones or leading to side paths which end suddenly, without justification.20 In this revolving, 'circular narrative', consisting of speculations, signs, rumours and doubts, Antonina may be 'anywhere'.21 A fragment of it will no doubt be a whisper of the Summer Time, another will fill the work The Room of Antonina and become one of the tales of the Love Stories, while the last and at the same time the subsequent one is only finding its shape in the New York apartment, where the artist currently lives and works, and one may only wish that 'in those repetitions of repetitions SHE is to be found...'.
*...and I could hide myself in the legend of a woman who never existed (I. Bachmann, Malina. Kraków: A5, 2011, p.56., trans. S.Nowak)
Małgorzata Jankowska